The separate question that still needs to be figured out, is who is going to be penalized for lying to the american people and taking away their freedoms [1]?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-ac...
The separate question that still needs to be figured out, is who is going to be penalized for lying to the american people and taking away their freedoms [1]?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-ac...
> The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while [Judge Schofield] didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure.
> Regardless, Schofield said she also decided to weigh any hypothetical harm against the potential value of the information to the public. “In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” she said, adding: “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.”
The judge also wrote that:
> ...despite the privacy concerns raised by the agency, releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption.”
Gizmodo failed to link to the actual opinion with this info: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york...
Edit: upon reading more, now I'm not sure if the NYT already has the names and addresses and is just seeking the metadata or if they don't need that data to do their analysis. Your guess might have been right, the ruling is unclear.
The point of the person you're responding to is that the NYT doesn't need to seek names or addresses, because they're already public information. Anyone can go look up the docket and see them[1].
So, their argument I believe is that, given that the names and addresses of the filers of comments are already publicly available, what further privacy concern is there in releasing IP address information?
And there might be one. IP address & UA might further allow me to correlate the user's activity elsewhere; some comments didn't submit names or addresses — IIRC these were "required" but some people filled in the fields with things like "none".
There were also allegations that the names of some comments were falsified on comments not in favor of net neutrality. IP address information might lend evidence to or against those allegations.
[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-...
They usually publish the names of people who commented don't they? I know mine was accessible.
> Any comments that you submit to the FCC on a proposed rulemaking, petition, or other document for which public comment is requested will be made public, including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission. We may share non-personally identifiable information with others, including the public, in aggregated form, in partial or edited form, or verbatim.
Wording here is a little ambiguous. As a techie, it's pretty easy to make an argument that the IP address is something I "included" in the submission (it's part of the packets my computer is sending on my behalf), but I'm not sure the average person would read it that way, instead interpreting it as pertaining only to information they explicitly typed into a text box.
- how many submissions came from the ISP law offices address block?
- how many submissions came from lobby group #12's address block?
- which ip addresses had more than 20 unique submissions?
then use the results as the basis for investigations. Some results could be benign, some results could be less so.
A random sample should be sufficient to see whats going on, if its sufficiently widespread to affect results.