LOS ANGELES—As the Federal Communications Commission was preparing to repeal its own net neutrality rules in 2017, it solicited input from the public, via comments on the FCC website. But the FCC was somehow flooded with bogus comments, many using the identities of real people — including two United States senators.
But despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the New York Times and other news organizations, FCC Chair Ajit Pai refused to hand over the IP addresses showing the origins of the fake comments.
Last week, however, a federal judge ruled that the FCC’s stonewalling must end, granting Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Gabriel Dance access to the server logs that should contain those IP addresses and give a better idea of where the phony, mostly pro-repeal public comments originated.
United States Southern District of New York Judge Lorna Schofield issued an opinion Friday ruling that concerns over whether the FCC’s policy-making process was “vulnerable to corruption,” and the possibility of massive fraud in the comment submission outweighed the privacy issues cited by the FCC in turning down the Times’ FOIA request.
“In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” the federal judge wrote. “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.”
The FCC had argued that releasing the IP addresses would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” against the online commenters.
Amid suspicion in 2018 that the Russian government may have been behind the flood of fake net neutrality comments, Pai publicly admitted that “half-million comments submitted from Russian e-mail addresses” were indeed included among the phony comments.
About 11 months later, a major investigation by BuzzFeed News revealed that another 1.5 million fabricated net neutrality comments were generated by a single Republican political consultant, Shane Cory, founder of the firm Media Bridge, which was reportedly hired by the telecommunications industry lobbying group Broadband For America.
As of Monday, the FCC had not commented on the judge’s ruling, or on whether it would would grant access to the IP addresses for the Times reporters.
Photo By pixelcreatures / Pixabay
