Fake Net Neutrality Comments Draw A Federal Probe
buzzfeednews.com
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“We’ll investigate.” “Here’s the report. We recommend minimal/no action.”
Well, that has to change...
Also, if half of these are _super_ fake, the server logs should be quite revealing.
They may be routinely ignored, but there is a price to pay for ignoring the law. Even parking tickets you can brush off for a while but you'll pay (a lot) later.
Or is something different for this administration?
While I don't agree with GP (like, not at all), Pai has shown repeatedly that this appears to be true. The FCC remains completely unchallenged and OP.
Huh? All I'm saying is FCC comments don't matter. And therefore neither do fake ones. Not sure what you're referring to...
If the comments matter only because the law requires them, that's a very weak argument.
If the law requires that they be considered in the process of creating policy, then fraudulently spamming comments is a direct attempt to subvert the policy making function of the FCC.
We cavalierly assume the comments do not matter because of an underlying assumption; that FCC Chair Pai will not actually consider them regardless of their contents, and that he functionally controls the decision to enact or repeal NN regulations. Imagine if we had a different FCC chair - would the comments still not matter?
There are two problems preventing the comments from fulfilling their intended function, but the existence of a second problem (Pai's refusal to discharge the duties of his office honorably) does not negate the first (the fraudulent corruption of the public comments record).
The important distinction here is that they have to be considered as comments, not votes. For example, if a whole lot of comments say more or less the same thing, then that only counts as one comment. In this case the politics had already been decided so no comment could affect the general outcome. In a very real sense the comments did not matter in this case. In other situations they can matter.
The pointless distraction related to the various attempts to spam the FCC comments in the end prevented actual politics that could of possibly retained net neutrality.
Two negatives doesn't make a positive sadly.
- FCC comments has to matters
- Fake FCC comments shouldn't be accepted
Theses are 2 problems currently, both have to be fixed, having them both doesn't make them alright.
Even if they did matter - the spam comments are largely the same as reddit or HN spam i.e. as long as they can be filtered out it doesn't really matter.
https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...
To quote the dissenting opinion - "roughly half a million comments were filed from Russian e-mail addresses. Something here is rotten".
If this happened in an election, there would be rioting in the streets. This is blatant interference.
They don't, and everyone knows it. But this involved a charged political issue, so people act upset.
Unfortunately, one of them is on course to be the next Attorney General.
Enough to give pause for a moment of thought.
Maybe there should be an internet startup selling e-stamps.
What can we do to prevent this behavior in the future?
Why is Ajit Pai not in jail?
Vote in 2020. Will you have issues with the person you're voting for? Probably. Should you vote for them anyway? Yes.
If you take every chance you can to get your candidate on the ballot, that lesser of two evils problem diminishes.
No you are not crazy, you just haven't studied the game theory of voting. In our old, outdated first-past-the-post voting system voting, according to game theory you should vote for the less or 2 evils. A vote for a 3rd party that has no chance of winning is no different than not voting at all. Most people intuitively get this, which is why we are stuck with a 2 party system.
There are better more democratic system like Maine's rank choice voting. There you can safely vote for your favorite candidate without worrying about the spoiler effect. If you want to learn more:
How do we do that? People get fed up and vote for the third party even if they know they wont win. Next election a few more people do the same. Even though the candidate they voted for isnt going to win. The next election a few more... and eventually change.
Really if I view my two options as awful I'd rather vote for someone I actually want or no one at all. If someone offers me a nasty drink with a rotten vegetable floating in it and a nasty drink with a rotten fruit in it I'm not going to drink the one with the fruit just because it's a little less gross than the other.
Yes, I'm sure the Clinton administration would be completely free of any influence from corporate lobbyists.
Here's Clinton's stance in March 2016: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/257569-clinton-touts-n...
Here's what I wrote above:
Will you have issues with the person you're voting for? Probably. Should you vote for them anyway? Yes.
Was that her public or her private stance?
88.6% of Stein voters in Pennsylvania would've flipped that state.
20.8% of Stein voters in Michigan would've flipped that state.
73% of Stein voters in Wisconsin would've flipped that state.
... assuming that the remaining 76% of Johnson voters abstained.
If 50% of libertarians and 100% of green voters voted Democrat, and the other 50% of libertarians voted Republican, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have gone to the Democrats, and nothing else would have changed.
If 30% of libertarians and 100% of green voters voted Democrat, and the other 70% of libertarians voted Republican, New Hampshire would have gone to the Republicans, and nothing else would have changed.
I suspect 30% is closer than 50% in terms of how many libertarians would have voted Republican if there was no libertarian option.
Source on calculations: run the following in the console on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
// What fraction of Libertarians would vote Republican if they had
// to choose between Democrats and Republicans
var fracLToD = 0.3, fracLToR = 1 - fracLToD;
// Same for Greens
var fracGToD = 1.0, fracGToR = 1 - fracGToD;
// Find the table
var electionResultsTable = [].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('table.wikitable'))
.filter(t => t.querySelector('thead tr th.headerSort') && t.querySelector('thead tr th.headerSort').textContent.match(/^State/))[0];
// Process
[].slice.call(electionResultsTable.querySelectorAll('tr')) // Get rows
.slice(2, -1) // Chop off header and footer
.map(row => [].slice.call(row.querySelectorAll('td')).map(td => td.textContent)) // Get cell contents
.map(cs => ({
"state":cs[0],
"d":parseInt(cs[2].replace(/,/g, ''))||0, // democrats
"r":parseInt(cs[5].replace(/,/g, ''))||0, // republicans
"l":parseInt(cs[8].replace(/,/g, ''))||0, // libertarians
"g":parseInt(cs[11].replace(/,/g, ''))||0 // greens
})) // grab the cols we care about
.map(({state,d,r,l,g}) => ({
state,
d,
r,
l,
g,
// winnerWith3 is the winner as-is, with third parties
winnerWith3:d > r ? 'd' : 'r',
// winnerNo3 is the winner as-is, with third parties
winnerNo3:d + l * fracLToD + g * fracGToD > r + l * fracLToR + g * fracGToR ? 'd' : 'r'
}))
// And grab the states where excluding third parties would have changed the results
.filter(({winnerWith3, winnerNo3}) => winnerWith3 != winnerNo3)They're attractive as stump speeches platitudes about limited government and lower taxation. The second they're in office, there's suddenly lots of cash available for increased defense spending, agricultural subsidies and funding prosecutions for non-violent drug crimes.
My bet is that he signed off on things that he knew to be false, and that he exhibited willful negligence. In the process, he has likely acted unlawfully. His ultimate conviction might be fraud... hard to tell at this point until the FBI digs through everything.
I don't see any credible allegation that he lied here. Here's another article which states explicitly
>Although the OIG report doesn't suggest that Pai deliberately misled Congress, it doesn't let FCC management off the hook entirely.
Believing your chief information officer and relaying the information they give until you become aware that it was false doesn't mean you lied.
https://www.wired.com/story/fcc-net-neutrality-investigation...
If the FCC was "considering" known forged comments then it is probably actionable, even if the result is the same. If the FCC never considered the comments (which is most likely) then that's actionable, too.
[There's some quote about the Odyssey not being written by Homer, but another person with the same name...]
People don't understand that corporations, and to a larger extent, governments, are Medusa. You can cut a snake off, but there are more, who were trained by {executive}. (And it doesn't actually stop the {bad_practice} from happening; the head wasn't cut off.) (And for those who really want the myth, the head still turned people to stone, IE 'we've always done it this way.')
Don't get me wrong; as a net-isizen, I want Pai to rot in hell for everything he's done, but what is the rational behind putting people in jail?
USA already has enough people incarcerated from tiny drug charges; what makes this any better? Throwing people in jail won't solve anything, so why is that the biggest reaction to stuff like this?
Because the current set of disincentives to act in this way are not adequate, and we further recognize that this is not a new problem.
> but what is the rational behind putting people in jail?
I think the hope is that these people will see the oversized punishment and avoid taking jobs in government service that seem to be taken exclusively to benefit their own agendas rather than to perform any public service.
> what makes this any better?
It actually stands a chance of modifying the behavior of the target group. It's a disincentive that they almost certainly don't want to face, as opposed to drug addicts who see it as a temporary inconvenience to their _addiction_. Are you suggesting that these executives are suffering from an addiction issue?
> so why is that the biggest reaction to stuff like this?
Because we've been watching this happen over and over again for years and we're sick of it being an issue. It's an over-reaction to be sure, but it's well justified given our history of failures here.
Putting people in jail for doing bad things is a signal to future people who want to do those bad things that they will suffer consequences for it. This will make them rethink doing those things. AKA "deterrence"
If people can do these things and get away with it, why wouldn't they? They make billions of dollars doing this and have no chance of suffering any negative consequences. If you were in a room with a billion dollars on the table and you knew you'd be free to take it and no one would ever come after you for it, wouldn't you take it?
> You can cut a snake off, but there are more, who were trained by {executive}
If your boss told you to do a bunch of things, and then got thrown in jail for doing exactly those things, are you saying that you would keep on doing them? Most people wouldn't.
In the 18th century, they used the Guillotine.
I'm sure the reference to the death penalty is being hyperbolic, but this is a little different from some kid pretending to be a Navy Seal to sound like a tough guy.
There are big corporations doing much more despicable things then registering fake comments over net neutrality. Hyperbole or not, calling for the guillotine over fake comments against net neutrality is over the top compared to say fossil fuel companies and their liability related to global warming, or pharmaceuticals extorting patients for medicines like insulin or the epi-pen. That I could understand wanting the guillotine. Not fake net neutrality comments.
Here's the deal. I am PRO NET NEUTRALITY. I hate that Ajit Pai did away with it. He may have colluded with the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world to get rid of it, he might have just opened the door for them to do what they did. It's awfully hard to prove if he did help post fake comments. I doubt he cared what was in them to begin with. I suspect most people knew those comments were fake, it was just a smoke screen for doing what the big companies wanted.
Eventually the many will get fed-up, and the few will become the none.
You may also start to see some parallels.
Because I haven't seen any such claims. It seems to me that people are demanding he be put in jail for drafting and voting for a regulation they disagree with.
I agree he should not be put in jail solely on the basis of allegations from the Internet. I don't think anyone is proposing that.
In the best case, we could say he was negligent in assessing the validity of the comments that were submitted to his agency. After all, subsequent investigations have been able to determine the comments were fraudulent, so why didn't he?
If he knew they were fake and just ignored that fact because they supported what he wanted to do anyway, that's another thing. If he was being compensated in some backdoor way from the industry for ignoring that the comments were fake, that's yet another thing. These are things that should be investigated.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about what sorts of responsibilities government officials have.
That said, wether there was some crime or not is an orthogonal issue.
Do you think he should have blocked comments from there? Or what, specific, actions should he have taken?
Lots of advocacy groups offered a form for users to submit comments with a pre-filled comment field in support of net neutrality. I used one myself. The fact that the text is the same does not necessarily imply the comment is fake.
There are many other comments where the person who supposedly submitted the comment says that they didn't. That would be a fake comment.
> Or what, specific, actions should he have taken?
I don't know, how about something besides "not a damn thing"? How about tracking down the source of the fake comments and fining or otherwise holding them accountable if it's within his jurisdiction to do so, or turning them over to the appropriate authorities if not? How about cancelling the comment period due to the rampant fraud, implementing some measures to verify user and re-opening comments to try to get something accurate? How about giving the tiniest shit about the public he's supposed to be serving? Is that too much ask?
And would you say that having one side flood the system with millions of fraudulent comments is conducive to this purpose? Before you object, yes it was overwhelmingly one side. FTA of the 14 organizations being investigated, 11 were anti-NN and only 3 are pro.
If what you say were true, all they should have had to do was submit their one comment with their best argument against net neutrality so that the committee could consider it. Surely their sound argument would be enough to win the day, right?
But that's not what they did, is it? Instead of submitting one argument, they tried to overload the system. It's almost as if they wanted to prevent the committee from considering the other side's argument, rather than presenting their own, isn't it? Does that sound like a healthy, functional democracy to you? Is that the sort of tactic that you would like to have deciding how our government is run?
But I think portraying this as part of some broad conspiracy is a stretch. In theory the fraudulent ones (as opposed to the merely manipulated ones facilitated by websites giving one side of the issue) could have been placed by one bored teen script kiddy. I agree it should be investigated, but I don't think there's reason to demonize Pai for that.
And none of those submissions were "initiated by real people" as you claim - they were initiated by the organization, with the support of people some of whom were real (if you think out of millions of people every single one gave their real name, you're naive).
At least per the stated/apparent design of BffN's site, there was a 1:1 ratio between submitted comments to the FCC and someone explicitly requesting "yes, please submit this comment on my behalf". If you have evidence contradicting BffN's claimed mode of operation, then let's hear it.
I'm sure some comments were submitted via pseudonyms, the same way you and I post under pseudonyms as opposed to one of us representing ourselves as Ajit Pai, a real person who happens to be FCC chair. It's possible some battleofthenet-originated comments involved fake names that were similarly misappropriated but there doesn't seem to be any body of people complaining about that having happened to them, in contrast to the anti-NN comment submissions.
Now if you have any evidence of such an effort, I encourage you to publish or submit it to investigators. But if you don't, it looks like you're trying to undermine the investigation of a big thing by complaining about the potential failings of a smaller thing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-of-people-post-comment...
>The Journal found instances of fakes that favored antiregulation stances but also comments mirroring consumer-groups’ pro-regulation talking points, posted without permission of people whose names were on them.
>One 369-word comment supporting the Obama-era net-neutrality rules was posted on the FCC website more than 300,000 times. One of those was attributed to Gloria Burney, 87, a retired speech therapist in Los Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.”
Weasel words. Who is making this accusation? Which cable providers are accused? What is the basis for this accusation?
I've gone through the whole article again and see no accusation against any cable providers
If the FCC's checking against some list of real names when validating comments, then the BftN-collected comments that didn't use a real name wouldn't go through anyway. If the FCC's not checking against some list of real names, then BtfN possibly getting submissions from people using nicknames is the least of the FCC's worries.
The comments under investigation were outright fake (e.g. using the identities of deceased persons, among other situations where it's demonstrable that the person identified as the "author" of the comment did not actually authorize it).
Well done!
>Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
We aren't helpless to sanction the powerful and thereby change policies and practices. Sure, sometimes you need a few shots at it — sometimes it really is a machine — but changing the head does in fact change the organization. If you want a closer-to-home example, just look at Uber under Dara vs Uber under Travis.
May very well be that there's someone in line waiting to be the next Ajit Pai, but what are they gonna do if they just watched five other people go to jail for what they might've tried to do?
America just doesn’t prosecute and jail white collar criminals anymore, which is why it may seem odd to you that people call for jailing white collar criminals.
For every Martin Shkreli that actually gets prison time, far too many wealthy and powerful people get away with doing great harm to society; if it doesn’t involve blood or drugs, they go home to their families.
Jail and a felony conviction which permanently destroys your career is a big motivator. Fines and not admitting wrong doing is as much risk as gambling in Vegas with a lot better odds.
You mean Hydra. Medusa would turn anyone who looked at her to stone, Hydra would grow two heads to replace any one that was cut off.
Settle down. The hatred towards him is unbelievably off the charts.
Perhaps because if it were normal civilians they would be put in jail?
Why should an executive be exempt from laws?
https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality
I donate to the EFF as an individual. States are fighting back. There is an ongoing legal case.
Sure, and when the elected representatives get a majority they get to be kings for four or five years.
I don't think that's a good idea.