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FCC Admits It Was Never Actually Hacked (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The FCC has come clean on the fact that a purported hack of its comment system last year never actually took place, after a report from its inspector general found a lack of evidence supporting the idea. Chairman Ajit Pai blamed the former chief information officer and the Obama administration for providing "inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people." It was so galling to everyone looking for answers that the GAO was officially asked to look into it. The letter requesting the office's help at the time complained that the FCC had "not released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred, that it was effectively dealt with, and that the FCC has begun to institute measures to thwart future attacks and ensure the security of its systems." That investigation is still going on, but one conducted by the FCC's own OIG resulted in the report Pai cites.
Pai's statement was issued before the OIG publicized its report, as one does when a report is imminent that essentially says your agency has been clueless at best or deliberately untruthful at worst, and for more than a year. To be clear, the report is still unpublished, though its broader conclusions are clear from Pai's statement. In it he slathers Bray with the partisan brush and asserts that the report exonerates his office: "I am deeply disappointed that the FCC's former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I'm also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn't feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office. On the other hand, I'm pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes." UPDATE: The complete Office of Inspector General report has been released, refuting claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC's comment system last year.
Pai's statement was issued before the OIG publicized its report, as one does when a report is imminent that essentially says your agency has been clueless at best or deliberately untruthful at worst, and for more than a year. To be clear, the report is still unpublished, though its broader conclusions are clear from Pai's statement. In it he slathers Bray with the partisan brush and asserts that the report exonerates his office: "I am deeply disappointed that the FCC's former [CIO], who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people. This is completely unacceptable. I'm also disappointed that some working under the former CIO apparently either disagreed with the information that he was presenting or had questions about it, yet didn't feel comfortable communicating their concerns to me or my office. On the other hand, I'm pleased that this report debunks the conspiracy theory that my office or I had any knowledge that the information provided by the former CIO was inaccurate and was allowing that inaccurate information to be disseminated for political purposes." UPDATE: The complete Office of Inspector General report has been released, refuting claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC's comment system last year.
Pretty much it makes it clear you, as the lead of the FCC, couldn't tell the difference between what was obviously a hacked system even when presented evidence within days of it occurring from multiple sources... and a plausible situation. You are nothing more than the same thing we've all learned to expect from this administration. A joke.
Isn't it? Well?
Somebody messed up and he got himself canned at least.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Well obviously this was done as a means of manipulation in relation to the network neutrality vote.
No consequence means 100% legality. Whether on the books or not it sets precident.
Some public servant who has hair on their testiculars and perhaps some semblance of remaining spine should take action. HAHAHAHAHA oh jeez almost pee'd myself a little there with that joke.
Some people deserve lynching. This guy is pure slime.
Taking a page right out of Trump's book... blame the guy who came before you.
Is there a single agency, department, or aide in this degenerate president's administration that is not steeped in corruption and lies?
I would feel better if there was, because otherwise I'd have to begrudgingly acknowledge that Trump is history's greatest evil genius. I mean, he must have accidentally hired an honest person, right? I mean, even his campaign was a parade of reprobates and sleaze. It just never stops.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We aren't fucking idiots Pai. We know it was never hacked.
It's that some unknown parties were abusing the comment system and automatically generating comments supporting getting rid of net neutrality. When reached, many of the people said they didn't even know what it was, and definitely didn't fill out the comment form.
In addition, there were some very peculiar things going on with it. Such as the timestamps correlated with the names in order (alphabetically inserted).
Someone was definitely doing something screwy, and it was in support of dropping net neutrality. Somehow I think Ajit, being the slimeball that he is, won't be looking into this.
Obama people were clueless, several aids in the administration were hacked, Hillary had a server at her home, Russia had free will to hack DNC, Podesta and who knows who else during election. You have to wonder when we have more agencies then ever supposedly securing the nation this was all going on? These people can’t even decide if they were hacked or not. I sure hope we have some better people doing something besides digging up dirt of their opponents.
Ok... this is a mostly IT audience which should have noticed the red herring when this happened.
They claimed it was a "hack". No one hacks a web site to skew comments... they script the submissions. Bots. Or humans employed to manually add scripted comments.
So think about it- the FCC leadership is either so incompetent, or so evil, that they blamed the "truth" on hackers in order to avoid the appearance of unpopularity.
I point this out resigned to the fact that not many people care. An exercise in futility. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Love how Pai makes big deal of previous CIO being hired by previous administration... When he himself was hired by same previous administration. Great stance suddenly denouncing the guy who is gone, when plenty of people have denounced FCC claims all along, yet Pai somehow couldn't reach the same conclusions those people did until now. Obviously his next step is politically empowering those who made this criticism all along. Not.
It's totally not Pai himself that decided to push his anti Net Neutrality bias regardless, no sire, it's obviously some other dude that was hired by the previous administration, yup, totally legitimate claim.
This whole government is corrupt, way to go US of A for electing this garbage.
if you don't fire _all_ of them. When they let one go the one that got 'canned' goes to a cushy job at the telecoms (or whatever lobbyist group is buying whatever law we're talking about) and then another gets replaced.
This won't stop until Americans make refusing corporate & PAC money the primary litmus test for their candidates; _especially_ in primary elections. You can't serve two masters. Either you serve the people or you serve the donor class.
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Here's the thing -- when YOURE the one who has been caught lying, trying to pass the buck on to your predecessor just makes you look more like a douchebag.
GURUEVI you're a world-class faggot who can't even lie competently, so it's no surprise you're Trump's human ass plug also. Kill yourself before we hang your traitor hero, dumb lies won't help you now, bitch. Mueller time! You lose! :D
Once an Uncle Tom industry shill, always an Uncle Tom industry shill.
I once believed that minorities, given the chance to change the status quo when in power, would do so. Instead, time after time, after time, after time (Clarence Thomas, Ajit Pai, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton*, et al), they become as bad....or worse....than their majority predecessor.
* Hillary is included for wanting to "drone strike" Wikileaks Assage, notwithstanding her hawkish warmongering.
Strange (or unfortunately not strange) sequence of events.
Desire to dump net neutrality, but a pesky overwhelming support for it in the public comments.
Let's call this a hack and rule as desired.
But now we admit that there was no hack.
Ok, but that seems to say that the rulemaking rules were ignored.
Which might reverse the original desired.
So, why now are they backpedaling on the original hacking call?
Is there some criminal liability involved that would override the original desire?
How long do we have to have our intelligence insulted by this miserable twerp?
is there will be exactly zero consequences even after admitting they lied to pretty much everyone.
Zero. None. Nada. Zip.
As I posted in another thread about corporations and their standby scapegoats whenever they get caught doing something immoral, unethical
or downright illegal, so too does the government have their pockets full of excuses ready to go when they fall into the spotlight of shame.
They always tend to blame everyone except themselves.
Yet, so deep is the bullshit, they are too blind to realize that the real problem, is them.
The comment period for the NN rules was a shit show all around, and utterly failed to fulfill it's purpose because people on both sides faked and spammed millions of times. By far, most of the fakes / spams were opposing the rule. Roughly 87% of the crap was opposed, probably because those who were in favor (isps) were more likely to understand that spamming shit comments would be absolutely pointless, as opposed to the Facebook reactionaries who had until then never heard of a "comment period".
It's helpful to understand what the comment process is all about. The agency publishes a draft of the rule and then people interested can comment on the wording, structure, and details of the draft. The agency then looks at each comment and adjusts the wording where appropriate, where they agree adjustments are needed, in order to produce the final draft. Occasionally, there is a second round of comments, with an interim draft.
It is NOT American Idol, not "press 2 to vote for Ajit Pai". It's not anything like a vote, in any way. It's a process to refine the wording and details, turning a proposed draft into the final rule.
Useful / proper comments which can effect this process point to specific words in specific sections, such as:
In section 2, subsection c, the proposed list does not indicate whether those requirements are "or" or "and". The word "or" should be inserted like so:
ISPs may block traffic that is:
1. Spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM act
2. A ddos attack as defined in 3(b)y
OR
3. Authorized to be blocked by the commission
I've had success with very minor policy "adjustments" as well, saying the list should also include and item #4 foobar because while it is similar to a ddos, it doesn't exactly fit the definition in 3(b)y because whatever. I've never seen a policy reversal, or anything remotely resembling a reversal, take place during the comment period. Rather, it's minor adjustments to the details.
That's the type of comment that gets a change made. The FCC isn't asking what their policy should be, they are looking for bugs in the way they have written the rules.
Of the top fake / spam comments, six of the top seven bogus comments, the ones bulk-submitted the most times, were OPPOSING the policy:
http://www.pewinternet.org/201...
Such spam is utterly pointless since the comment process is not a vote. It's more like proofreading.
No kidding? You mean the comments site which actually has an API for bulk submissions wasn't attacked by 1337 h4x0r5, just someone using the API exactly how it was intended? Who'da thunk it?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The Right are much better than the Left at doing both X and Y.
Where X=dodgy deals and Y=getting (evil) things done
The Left would love to do more of X and even Y, but they just don't have the gumption.
Nice fellow, that Obama.
By posting Facebook articles.
Words and meanings are only loosely connected.
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Pai is 100% correct here. I mean it's possible.
Pai is still a partisan hack, dismantling Net Neutrality when the majority of citizens don't want him to. Therefore I rather doubt that this whole "throw the previous command structure under the bus" defense makes him look good. Instead it makes him look more like an agency head looking for someone to blame, and he doesn't even mind tarring his own agency.
You do remember that you are the one in charge now? Does the buck stop with you or does the buck stop with anyone but you?
Just keep digging Pai. Just keep digging.
The millions of duplicative spams sent in opposition came primarily from Demand Progress, an organization co-founded by Aaron Swartz orginally to protest seizure of domains like MegaUpload which exist primarily to engage in commerical criminal copyright infringement for profit.
Is it your assertion that Aaron Swartz and his associates were trying to "make it look like those who opposed net neutrality were trying to game the system", apparently in collaboration with the Russians? Because that's who submitted most of them.
Or has no one worked the giant coffee mug into this yet?
The term 'hack' comes from MIT train hobbyist and the "hacking" they did to their model train setups to do crazy stuff. It describes any elaborate and convoluted means of achieving a desired end. Arranging for tens of thousands of obviously fake comments to get posted and for those fake comments to be accepted as real definitely fits the bill.
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One down, two to go.
News at 11. Yawn.
Just wondering where the love is for Mr Pai. I mean, he can mobilise an army of sock puppets and trolls, but do they really truly love him?
Both sides are corrupt but the rightmost side is many times more corrupt. Pretending that it only goes as far as "both sides do it" is lying.
1. Lie
2. Lie
3. Lie again
More like a shit pai if you ask me.
"WHAT-EVA! I'll do what I want!" - - Ajit Pai
Pai was announcing an upcoming report from the FCC's inspector general. That inspector general is David L. Hunt. https://www.fcc.gov/inspector-general He was appointed in 2011, during the Obama administration, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/137015-david-hunt-named-fcc-inspector-general So this an Obama appointee reporting on an Obama appointee, not Pai going after an Obama administration official.
The level of blatant stupidity in these comments is astonishing.
Party of personal responsibility!
that the comments weren't real. Also, if you're a Russian troll you're doing a terrible job of it. And if you're not you're even worse at whatever the hell it is you're doing. I can't decide.
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WEEEEEEE didn't do shit. I voted for HER. #stillnotmypresident
How's life in the hypocrite lane?