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from the oh,-now-that-it-involves-YOUR-identity dept.
TechDirt reports
Last year, you'll recall that somebody abused the nonexistent privacy protections at the FCC website to flood the net neutrality repeal proceeding with millions of fake comments. While the vast majority of real people oppose the repeal, a bad actor was able to either fraudulently use the identities of real people (like myself), or hijack the identities of dead people to spam the proceeding with bogus support. The goal: undermine public trust in the public comment period in order to downplay the massive opposition to the FCC's handout to AT&T and Comcast.
Up to this point, the FCC has done less than nothing to investigate the fraud or prevent it from happening again, largely because it aided the FCC's agenda. In fact, the FCC went so far as to block a law enforcement investigation into who was behind the fraud.
Hoping to pull the scandal back onto a front burner, Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey this week sent a letter to the FCC stating that they've discovered that their names were also used to post fake comments during the repeal. The two demanded the FCC implement some kind of CAPTCHA system to help police automated bogus comments (a bot seems to have posted millions of bogus comments in alphabetical order), and asked what the agency was doing to prevent the problem from occurring again:
"Late last year, the identities of as many as two million Americans were stolen and used to file fake comments during the FCC's comment period for the net neutrality rule," the letter to Pai, dated May 21, read.
"We were among those whose identities were misused to express viewpoints we do not hold. We are writing to express our concerns about these fake comments and the need to identify and address fraudulent behavior in the rulemaking process."
The letter comes more than a year after alarms were first sounded over the tsunami of seemingly faked comments submitted by "astroturfing" campaigns to sway the commission's opinion. Many of the comments were put up in the name of actual people without their knowledge or permission.
Ultimately, about 22 million messages were submitted, and while three in five were in favor of net neutrality, once duplicates and those with garbage email addresses were tossed out, the overall sentiment was against net neutrality. About 17 per cent of the total, though, were likely filed by real people logging into the FCC's website rather than through the watchdog's API designed for accepting submissions via third-party applications and websites. It is suspected someone, or some people, abused this gateway using automated software to cram the regulator with millions of bogus submissions.
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Friday May 25 2018, @02:54AM (1 child)
Admittedly, we are way past due for someone's noon-time beverage of choice to be floating in the harbor. Problem is the population's got itself in a state where the active people have been aimed at each other and the principled people are too disgusted by the antics of the active people to want to act themselves. In the end, people throw each others' drinks in the harbor and ignore the greater problems because it's easier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:07AM
Pretty much no History classes bother to mention that the Boston Tea Party came about because of Crony Capitalism.
In 1698, UK.gov had granted the British East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea.
The Tea Act of 1773 further allowed the East India company to sell tea from China in the American colonies without paying any taxes, thus undercutting local tea merchants.
It was basically Amazon, 2 centuries earlier.
...or the Trump/GOP tax cut for the 1 Percent.
Take your pick.
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