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FCC Refuses Records For Investigation Into Fake Net Neutrality Comments (variety.com)
"FCC general counsel Tom Johnson has told the New York State attorney general that the FCC is not providing information for his investigation into fake net-neutrality comments, saying those comments did not affect the review, and challenging the state's ability to investigate the feds." Variety has more:
The FCC's general counsel, in a letter to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, also dismissed his concerns that the volume of fake comments or those made with stolen identities have "corrupted" the rule-making process... He added that Schneiderman's request for logs of IP addresses would be "unduly burdensome" to the commission, and would "raise significant personal privacy concerns."
Amy Spitalnick, Schneiderman's press secretary, said in a statement that the FCC "made clear that it will continue to obstruct a law enforcement investigation. It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem. To be clear, impersonation is a violation of New York law," she said... "The only privacy jeopardized by the FCC's continued obstruction of this investigation is that of the perpetrators who impersonated real Americans."
One of the FCC's Democratic commissioners claimed that this response "shows the FCC's sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process... Moreover, the FCC refuses to look into how nearly half a million comments came from Russian sources."
Amy Spitalnick, Schneiderman's press secretary, said in a statement that the FCC "made clear that it will continue to obstruct a law enforcement investigation. It's easy for the FCC to claim that there's no problem with the process, when they're hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem. To be clear, impersonation is a violation of New York law," she said... "The only privacy jeopardized by the FCC's continued obstruction of this investigation is that of the perpetrators who impersonated real Americans."
One of the FCC's Democratic commissioners claimed that this response "shows the FCC's sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process... Moreover, the FCC refuses to look into how nearly half a million comments came from Russian sources."
They're covering up their fraud by saying "It wasn't important" - but that's not going to fly.
Just like those giants.
Its just a SQL query, you twats!
It doesn't matter if any comments were faked or not. The FCC is not using any of the comments in their decision. The only comments that matter to them are those from Verizon et al.
So they are making their own. Freedom for the few and higher cost for the masses.
Either we break up the companies doing this, fine them, and punish the individuals (why isn't regulatory capture a federal felony?) - they will just keep attacking the foundations of the internet every chance they get.
From Glenn Greenwald (yeah, the same guy who helped Edward Snowden publish his whistleblowing documents..):
The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened
Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.
The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11:00 am EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.
This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” – someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify – to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 – ten days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online – and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.
It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump/Russia collusion story:
There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story – and then hyped it over and over and over – the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.
The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 – which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks – as everyone by then already knew – had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived – filled with false news and propaganda – by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.
No "fake news"?!?!?
Cut the crap. The media doesn't even bother claiming it was "fake but accurate" anymore.
Geez, what's next?
FBI agents in charge of investigating a politician being found to have deliberately removed words making it clear Hillary! committed a felony from Comey's "exoneration"of Lying HIllary!
FBI agents letting Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills walks after demonstrably lying about Lying Hillary!'s illegal email server, but who are now supposed to be believed because they SAY Michael Flynn lied to them? And that that one of those FBI agents was fired for pro-Lying Hillary! bias? (Just Google "Giglio material" to see how crooked and corrupt Meuller's "investigation" really is....)
Now what? We could find out those same FBI agents being found to have donated to Lying Hillary's campaign and then going to her NON-election-day party?
The FCC guy is right, though. Millions of fake comments had no bearing on the outcome at all, which was preordained.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That's step one. He can still file a subpoena or FOIA
It is a scandal that such a group can make such important decisions and that the congress is not taking action. It is very likely that the vote on December 14 will just follow the recommendation of its chairman and that the comments of the public are completely ignored. Instead, there is a lot of PR: there was a recent comment by Ken Engelhart in the New York times with the title "Why Concerns About Net Neutrality Are Overblown" Well Engelhat had been a Telecom guy for 25 years. Well what ever helps old friends ... It looks not good. If one believes this article then the only remaining hope would be the courts.
How many millions of Slashdot comments come from Russian sources.
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There was never even a need to do more than have a period for public comments. A lot of the spam is from adversarial interests against the general American population, such as ISPs, Russia, etc. I've seen all the recent interviews with Ajit, the guy looks like a sociopath just dribbling brain diarrhea hoping to muddy the waters just enough to flee with the illicit billions about to be reaped from America. The man has stone cold glee in his eyes, there was never a sideways fart given about non legal tender arguments. The real damage, though, is the anti-competitive, anti-trust no consumer protection, content and provider monopolies, and freedom to censor anything nonsense that is likely to follow. It won't end until they are held accountable, so at this rate never.
Regardless of what one thinks about the issues, the FCC does not (should not) vote based solely on how many comments one side or the other gets.
The point of asking for comments is certainly to gauge sentiments, but more importantly, to discover issues/constituencies the FCC staff did not consider in their evaluation of the impacts. Almost all the comments on this issue were just the same thing (nothing new to see there), although a few raised issues that did deserve FCC staff evaluation/response(s).
In case some of you missed it, the public input wasn't a vote. It doesn't matter who or how many said they wanted it or they should get rid of it. The public comment period was seeking novel legal arguments.
See that "Preview" button?
all the way to the US Supreme Court and then see, what this whole system is worth...
The FCC is pointing out the rules under which it's legally obligated to operate.
This notice and comment procedure is specified in law, and the FCC cannot legally deviate from it. Under the law, neither numbers of comments nor identities of commenters really matter. A regulatory body is required to address concerns raised in comments as they make their rules, but it doesn't matter who is bringing those concerns so long as they're addressed.
The FCC is merely pointing out that there is a legal process here, and the NY State suit isn't exactly in line with the federal law.
YES, there have been so many articles going around the internet that suggest this is some sort of voting process, that sending in form comments matter, but legally they do not. The FCC gets its orders from Congress, not from people submitting comments on the internet. Those articles were pretty damaging, misleading people about how this part of the US government is designed to operate, and leading them to misunderstand when things don't actually go the way they're told they should go.
So we're at a place where we need to correct that misinformation. People who are interested in the functioning of a body like the FCC now need to know just how the notice and comment process works.
By law numbers and identities don't matter for notice and comment, exactly as the FCC is pointing out. NY State should probably stop joining in on that rhetorical bandwagon suggesting otherwise.
Wouldn't this basically be a Freedom of Information Act violation? A pretty wanton one at that. Plus, what happened to the idea of states rights that conservatives are always going on about? Why shouldn't/couldn't a state act as an additional check on potential abuses of federal authority?
Hopefully the NYAG Office will file a complaint in a federal court to try to force compliance. Maybe they can even get an emergency injunction on the net neutrality vote. I hate to say that just because the FCC doesn't want to fork over records means they are hiding something, because there may be legitimate reasons for the refusal, but they haven't managed to articulate a single one so far. Add to that the way Pai has run the FCC over the last year, and how he exploited loopholes to hang around long after his term ended so that Trump could make him the Chairman... There's a foul stench coming from the State of Denmark, to modify a turn of phrase from The Bard. Maybe it's just Pai and the organization slowly rotting from the head down, maybe there's more.
It is a scandal that such a group can make such important decisions and that the congress is not taking action.
Except that congress stated explicitly that the internet not be regulated, and ditching NN brings the FCC in line with what congress wanted.
I am American and I know that the democrat party is not for trusting. They would like nothing moreso to see these records so they could make more fake news about them. Remember democrat party is same one that colluded with Russians to ship them uranium ore for what purpose we still dont know. Democrat party is not be trusted but chairman Pai is very trustworthy and is draining FCC swamp.
I hate Verizon with passion, but if you, Commie assholes, get within reach of nationalizing any more infrastructure, I will be defending their cables from your grabby Statist hands with everything I've got.
I didn't flee one Communism-destroyed country to witness another destroyed by the same demagogues and fools. Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea — you have your "worker's paradises" to move to. Stop destroying what's left of America.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
WTF? FCC comments are open to anyone and searchable.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What is wrong with you people?
...but who are now supposed to be believed because they SAY Michael Flynn lied to them?
He did lie to them. He said so himself when he put in a guilty plea. Believe me, I'm no big fan of the plea bargaining system in the US because of the way it rolls over the little guy who can't afford expensive lawyers, but Mike Flynn can afford expensive lawyers. That means, in order to plead guilty of this, they must have had him over a barrel. He plead guilty because he was as guilty as sin and they could have crucified him on much worse charges.
What we are now seeing the the oligarchy is so emboldened, they are openly saying "screw you citizens, you have no rights, only we have a right to your money".
The GOP hasn't won an honest election popular vote in 15 years - This open brazenness is just the beginning. The next step is law change. Notice that Trump has filled more Judge seats at this point in his tenure than Obama, Bush or Clinton... The GOP means to change the US in their favor, regardless of the "will of the people". We witnessing the resurgence what in the past was "robber barons" where law is bought and life is cheap.
I did legitimately Laugh Out Loud when I read the bit about unduly burdensome and possible invasion of privacy. This from the FCC after how they have acted.
One asks for public comments to know what the various parts of the pubic wants, to weigh in your deliberations. If you want to pretend to listen but actually ignore the comments, you have a comments period but set rules that exclude the answers you don't wish to hear.
You can ask for only blue-haired commentators, but that would be a bit obvious. Instead, you might ask for "novel" comments, meaning only those no-one had ever made before[1].
That should get it down to just things like "Dr Who personally said he disapproved" or "please eat an elephant", which can be ignored on the basis that they're non-responsive. (:-))
--dave
[1. of a new kind; different from anything seen or known before: a novel idea. Origin. 1375-1425; late Middle English. Courtesy of dictionary.com]
davecb@spamcop.net
Gulag FTW!
Ever.
None of the comments effected the review, whether for or against. The FCC was going to roll back Net Neutrality anyway, so who cares if they did or did not investigate the issue? They have made their lack of morals and accountability abundantly clear.
Secret meetings was the tip of the iceberg. This administration has no transparency whatsoever. Even when they do give you info it's at the last minute and illegible.
You would think the last election, where the winner lost by 3 million votes, would have made that abundantly clear. That loss wasn't an accident or a side effect of the electoral college. It was by design. That college has always been a buffer between the people and policy to keep them from getting too uppity and losing respect for their betters in the aristocracy. It's got nothing to do with being fair to Montana et al.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
He did lie to them. He said so himself when he put in a guilty plea. Believe me, I'm no big fan of the plea bargaining system in the US because of the way it rolls over the little guy who can't afford expensive lawyers, but Mike Flynn can afford expensive lawyers. That means, in order to plead guilty of this, they must have had him over a barrel. He plead guilty because he was as guilty as sin and they could have crucified him on much worse charges.
Yes, he pleaded guilty probably because he was. But IIRC, The Feds had his son on stuff too. So perhaps it was also a father's love that was part of his motivation.
The next few months will be fun. 'Scuse me, I need to make some popcorn.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The FCC has been screwing with us for years. They've hindered free software developers from obtaining source code for wifi chipsets and fully and properly supporting hardware. The government is also the reason we have the various problems we have today with net neutrality. We shouldn't need net neutrality- but government interfered in the early days of telephone and cable. The government ensured we would not have competition in the market and as time progressed it became nearly impossible for companies to enter a market where a monopoly was already created with or without there being a law in place to prevent new entrants to that market. We need to do more than end the FCC. We need to change the way spectrum is handled such that all parties must share the spectrum. This can be done via the development of new technologies. The airwaves should be turned into a packet switching network where no single party has control. Combining this with a electronic exchange system bandwidth can be divided up fairly amongst any participants following a sane and reasonable algorithm.
but Mike Flynn can afford expensive lawyers
How do you figure? By all reports he's now essentially ruined by legal expenses. This wasn't a rich business guy who entered politics, this was a government salary guy.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The general level of incompetence in this government is astounding...It's like one long, 4-year (or 8?) face palm. The next government is going to have quite a mess to cleanup on its plate.
The inmates are running the asylum. Congrats Trump voters. Instead of draining the swamp you assholes made it 100 times bigger.
The NY AG is investigating.
The FCC is not complying.
Court orders will be coming.
If need be no knock warrants.
oh Pai, you are a supposed to be a lawyer, so you know these things won't end well with your noncompliance.
(bonus points if you find the giggity joke)
[The FCC's general counsel] added that Schneiderman's request for logs of IP addresses would (...) “raise significant personal privacy concerns.”
I love that one, coming from the FCC when, to everyone’s surprise, they published (freely downloadable) the full set of comments, complete with not only names, but also e-mail address and (if provided) home address of their authors.
I don't know if it fits the definition when it was handed to them by the governing body and pressed into that mindset.
Honestly, I believe the FCC is a reflection of the ruling body and Tom Wheeler was a good example of that. His early career mindset was fairly similar to the current administration. At some point, he was 180'd on his platform and told to do good. As a company man, he did the best he could with the administrative direction.
Wheeler was a scumbag turned friend of the people. Unfortunately, Pit is the same kind of snake, but he has been directed to release all of the shackles on business.
I don't like it in any case, but I think it's important to keep perspective. Maybe, if every American could choose not to use Comcast then this wouldn't be terrible. However, not many of us have an actual choice in internet providers because of government restrictions. Perhaps it would have been better to improve competition before removing regulations.
Maybe we should just bring back beheadings.
The FCC should not have the power to withhold data like this. This is our government. That is our data.
It just shows you who Ajit Pai is working for. (Hint: Unless you're the CEO of Verizon, Ajit Pai is not working for you.)
> To be clear, impersonation is a violation of New York law
Great, now prove that whatever nut wrote out a script in 5 minutes to spam the FCC with comments they ignored did so in violation of the law? Because that's also necessary to establish standing.
Also, this is kind of a silly thing to press federal charges over. Whoever spammed that was likely inventing names, if someone happened to name their baby ClickOnThis, would you be impersonating them? It gets silly fast. Just like the thought that the government ever cared what we think.
You want to do actual good? Push for simple, concrete measures that can't be spun very well. Ones like "ISPs must disclose data caps and fees prominently in all advertising" and measures for a few other tricks they're going to scam us with. Then get your local representatives to sponsor such a bill, cutting off the lobbyists one finger at a time.
Because make no mistake, most actual people are not in favor of getting screwed by ISPs, they lobbyists are trying to make this a partisan thing to divide us on how to respond to them so that we do nothing and they can rob us blind. We can't let them do that. Pick individual dirty tricks, cut them off. Point to them doing that. Get away from giant bills no one reads that get spun into whatever. Yeah, I know, what we had going was good, but the lobbyists won that battle. Don't let them win the war by chasing silly stunts like this. Focus on cutting them off at the pass.
Let's face it- the fix is in.
Net neutrality is going to be removed because doing so will allow large corporations to make a shitload of money, AND because it will stifle the free exchange of information (including important political news and information).
Politicians HATE the fat that ordinary people can use the internet to help track what our government does. They HATE the fact that millions of people can instantly find out what they're doing, and band together to try and effect some change.
This benefits NO ONE except the mega-corps and politicians, and so they're going to do it no matter what we mere mortals want.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
When are you boring cunts going to get over your fixation on this particular old woman? I swear, every criticism Trump responds to it's "but Hillary".
It's scary that adults in this century are prepared to be this fucking pathetic.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
perhaps the real issue here is the fcc covering up their lack of competence to manage a basic internet information service. The irony hurts. Really, that seems like what this maneuver may accomplish as far as sweeping the key issue under the rug. Just like their handwaving reference to 'our commercial cloud partners' when talking about how their information service will handle the ddos issue. Of course the mind boggling thing is that *presumably* they have effectively the knowledge base of the entire fucking nsa and cia at their disposal, and they still can't do better than pass the buck to their 'commercial cloud partners'. For fuck's sake, when the FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION admits lack of in-house competency to RUN A BASIC WEBSITE, it's pretty clear what the score is. Certainly an interesting 'history of the internet' chapter for some long future academic text...
To paraphrase Einstein:
Since we can't find any difference between what government officials do and what corrupt stooges do then we are justified in treating government officials the same as corrupt stooges.
I've heard of many instances where people's names and cities match. These aren't just randomly generated, but some database of people that someone obtained and used to submit anti-Net Neutrality comments in those people's names.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If they wanted to be transparent they could have just asked to only hear legal tender arguments.
Of course they are... I mean, they spent all that time and money creating bots to flood the site with them in the first place. Why would they want to backtrack on that now?
The FCC's own rulemaking process requires it.
However, nothing obligates them to give a rat's ass about what they learn from it. Your tax dollars at work.
Never confuse "We want to hear from you" with "We care about what you say."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
So releasing the IP addresses would "raise significant privacy concerns," but requiring the name and home address for every comment and making it publicly available on the internet does not? Or are you just afraid that the IP addresses won't remotely match the postal addresses? And that they suspiciously originate from a data center somewhere in Northern Virginia?