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FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies To Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims: Gizmodo (gizmodo.com)
As the FCC was grappling with accusations of a fake cyberattack last spring, it intentionally misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency's official story, news outlet Gizmodo reported Tuesday. From the report: Internal emails reviewed by Gizmodo lay bare the agency's efforts to counter rife speculation that senior officials manufactured a cyberattack, allegedly to explain away technical problems plaguing the FCC's comment system amid its high-profile collection of public comments on a controversial and since-passed proposal to overturn federal net neutrality rules.
The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred -- not to the reporters who've requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who've demanded to see it. Instead, the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters, chiefly by spreading word of an earlier cyberattack that its own security staff say never happened.
The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred -- not to the reporters who've requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who've demanded to see it. Instead, the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters, chiefly by spreading word of an earlier cyberattack that its own security staff say never happened.
This was an administration openly elected to inflict cruelty on those that expected anything meaningful from shared governance.
Fake information to support absurd lies is kind of their "thing".
Outrage SHOULD be expected, but we're being trained to turn off all our mental alarms against everything important we used to care about.
At covering up fraudulent activity. Ajit Pai and his regime is a group of criminals who are funded via ISP and telecom providers to give them precisely what they want, no matter how much it affects his constituents OR the world at large.
the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters
In other words, the Fox tabloid was complicit in this sham. What a surprise. This is the same group who is furiously backpedaling when they put out a picture of a Philadelphia Eagle's player kneeling, but used the picture for a story about players kneeling for the anthem. The player is a Christian and was doing a pre-game prayer. He even called them out for their propaganda.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Once again, msmash, you're doing it wrong. The person saying the thing goes before the colon, and what they're saying goes after.
It seems to me that the issue is more a combination of incompetence and wishful thinking than it is an FCC conspiracy.
John Oliver asks his viewers to go to the FCC site and post comments supporting net neutrality. To a less-competent sysadmin, that surge of traffic may look like a DDoS. He mentions the possibility and it percolates up to guys like Pai. Pai is thrilled that there is a malicious, technical explanation for this event, because it allows him to dismiss the notion that a significant proportion of people may support net neutrality. Public support for NN doesn't fit within Pai's pre-constructed worldview, so he's more comfortable not facing that possibility.
Bots abuse the FCC comment API to manufacture millions of fake comments against NN. At the time the attack was ongoing, I happened to be looking at the FCC page, trying to make a comment of my own, and I watched the automated comments pouring in. They were coming in at multiple comments per second, all with identical text, and in alphabetical order by the name of the commentor. It was blindingly obvious that someone had just set up a script that created comments from a database of names and addresses. But Pai refuses to investigate, insisting that all of those comments are obviously legitimate. Of course all those comments are real, because they support his pre-constructed worldview. It just makes sense to him.
And after all the incompetence and confirmation bias, after publicly stating a bunch of things that turned out to be bullshit, they don't want to investigate, they don't want anyone else to investigate, and they don't want to provide any information. Because the results will make them look either partisan or stupid. And we'll tolerate a certain amount of either of those things, but there's a chance this would go too far.
Seriously, is there even one appointee that Trump made that is even halfway honest and above-board? Or are they all really corrupt and/or incompetent and/or have their own secret agenda that has nothing to do with protecting and serving the United States?