18 ms·

Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

210 points by EndXA 6y ago

rasengan 6y ago
This is definitely a touchy subject. As the article notes, this will remove the privacy from all people who commented on net neutrality, but it will also allow 2 NYTimes reporters to try to figure out why there were fake comments that led to the loss of neutrality for the people. The separate question that still needs to be figured out, is who is going to be penalized for lying to the american people and taking away their freedoms [1]? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-actually-hacked/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-ac...
- EndXA 6y ago
  The privacy aspect to this is definitely touchy: > The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while [Judge Schofield] didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure. > Regardless, Schofield said she also decided to weigh any hypothetical harm against the potential value of the information to the public. “In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” she said, adding: “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.” The judge also wrote that: > ...despite the privacy concerns raised by the agency, releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption.”
  - rasengan 6y ago
    What’s crazy is if you own the ISP (who generally wants to repeal net neutrality) you already know which names are associated with each IP as well as other information since you looked up their credit score among other things.
  - warent 6y ago
    This is really great news and I admire the judge's dedication to truth and justice. It makes me wonder how much pressure the judge recieved behind-the-scenes before making this ruling. Excited to see how this develops. Unfortunately I suspect the answer is probably more mundane than anything; e.g. the comments were from a botnet which the FCC lacks technical competence to deal with.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I’m a bit confused about the privacy issue here. Isn’t the (alleged) commenter’s full name and address published along with their comment in the public filing? If the commenter’s address is already published what other information can be gleaned from their IP address? Is the fear that someone could use it to piece together a person’s web history?
    - henryfjordan 6y ago
      The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. Gizmodo failed to link to the actual opinion with this info: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york-times-company-v-federal-communications-commission/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york... Edit: upon reading more, now I'm not sure if the NYT already has the names and addresses and is just seeking the metadata or if they don't need that data to do their analysis. Your guess might have been right, the ruling is unclear.
      - deathanatos 6y ago
        > The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. The point of the person you're responding to is that the NYT doesn't need to seek names or addresses, because they're already public information. Anyone can go look up the docket and see them[1]. So, their argument I believe is that, given that the names and addresses of the filers of comments are already publicly available, what further privacy concern is there in releasing IP address information? And there might be one. IP address & UA might further allow me to correlate the user's activity elsewhere; some comments didn't submit names or addresses — IIRC these were "required" but some people filled in the fields with things like "none". There were also allegations that the names of some comments were falsified on comments not in favor of net neutrality. IP address information might lend evidence to or against those allegations. [1]: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC&submissiontype_description=COMMENT https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-...
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    Would a good middle ground would be add some salt to each unique IP, hash the addresses, and hand hashed data over?
    - nightfly 6y ago
      It would make the ip address information useless. What they probably want to do is figure out how many comments came from the same network blocks that were allocated to organizations (to detect large numbers of fake comments). If you hash the ip addresses you can't figure out which ones came from the same network allocation, the most you could do is figure out which comments came from identical ip addresses.
      - crocodiletears 6y ago
        True. Bar assigning each hashed ip a block id, the data would be pretty useless. Even then you might still lose out on some important metadata.
- duxup 6y ago
  Is there any realistic expectation of anonymity when it comes to FCC comments? They usually publish the names of people who commented don't they? I know mine was accessible.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- acdha 6y ago
  I don’t think this is actually much of a privacy change. Here’s what you agree to when you submit a comment: > Any comments that you submit to the FCC on a proposed rulemaking, petition, or other document for which public comment is requested will be made public, including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission. We may share non-personally identifiable information with others, including the public, in aggregated form, in partial or edited form, or verbatim. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/how-comment#comments https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/how-comment#comments
  - Gaelan 6y ago
    > including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission Wording here is a little ambiguous. As a techie, it's pretty easy to make an argument that the IP address is something I "included" in the submission (it's part of the packets my computer is sending on my behalf), but I'm not sure the average person would read it that way, instead interpreting it as pertaining only to information they explicitly typed into a text box.
    - acdha 6y ago
      Yes, but even in that case how much does it change matters to go from your name, city, state, zip code, email address, etc. to include an IP? I mean, a data miner might be able to tell if you were posting from a house which isn’t yours or using your employer’s network but the entered PII is enough to uniquely identify a large number of people.
  - m463 6y ago
    You could probably aggregate the IP addresses in a few ways and even maintain privacy: - how many submissions came from the ISP law offices address block? - how many submissions came from lobby group #12's address block? - which ip addresses had more than 20 unique submissions? then use the results as the basis for investigations. Some results could be benign, some results could be less so.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Why not release a randomly selected sample of 100 comments? A random sample should be sufficient to see whats going on, if its sufficiently widespread to affect results.
foob4r 6y ago
Data corruption in 3, 2...
- squarefoot 6y ago
  "Sorry, we unknowingly purchased crappy SMR disks for storage and backups, and they borked all data after a few resyncs. Blame Western Digital!".
hagemey 6y ago
127.0.0.1
- zigzaggy 6y ago
  Or probably even 192.168.1.1
- Avamander 6y ago
  I actually wouldn't be surprised, if this were a reverse-proxied piece of software.
- FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
  Because there's no place like home.
ikeboy 6y ago
Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue. https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 this WSJ article found thousands of people that said they never posted the comments attributed to them. >One 369-word comment supporting the Obama-era net-neutrality rules was posted on the FCC website more than 300,000 times. One of those was attributed to Gloria Burney, 87, a retired speech therapist in Los Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.” A comment from “Elzor The Blarghmaster” at 9632 Elm Road, Maywood, Ill., was among the 818,000 identical FCC comments backing the Trump policy. No such address could be found, said Jimmie Thompson, a U.S. Postal Service carrier in Maywood. If you've got the impression that the bot compaigns were only from one side, you've just been misled by biased media like OP, which links to prior coverage of one company and doesn't bother to tell you about the broader picture.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ikeboy 6y ago
  >He said the FCC received more than 7.5 million comments consisting of the same short-form letter supporting the current rules from about 45,000 unique email addresses, “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website.” He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”
- Arubis 6y ago
  And of course, if the tinfoil hat mentality is appealing, why not one actor spamming comments for _both_ sides? If said actor prefers one position they can just have a an order-of-magnitude difference in what they submitted; either way, said hypothetical party can be satisfied with eroding public trust in the process.
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    Perhaps - my own pet theory is it was just some bored guys on 4chan who did it because they could. The thing is, a lot of the bots didn't submit comments directly, which would have required getting keys to submit in bulk and leave a trail. Instead, they filled out forms on the many sites that were set up to take names and submit form letters to the FCC. So some advocacy org might set up a site and get a million comments, half of them might be legit and half might be from a script kiddy running a database of addresses and names through the site, which then submits it to the FCC. The site has no particular incentive to vet the submissions. Knowing the IP address of the entity who sent the message to the FCC is close to useless, in that scenario.
sloshnmosh 6y ago
I remember that there were websites that allowed users to comment on NN that had pre-made comments already completed. The user only needed to enter a valid email address and could then forward the comment to the FCC or erase and put in their comment in their own words. I could see how this would look like obvious spam if users did not take the time to modify the form into their own thoughts. This shall be very interesting indeed. Pass the popcorn.
- carapace 6y ago
  The point is whether canned responses came from a "organic" groundswell of concerned citizen or a handful of astroturfers.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    Which doesn't make much sense, because the arguments are used in the decision making process, not the number of comments. This wasn't some kind of vote where you could stuff the ballot box, this was somewhere that you could flag items of concern. We all know that anyone could fake an IP address, as well. It would take little thought to spam a bunch of nonsense through a random proxy via a script. But, just like every other kind of spam, it would just get ignored by the recipient. They were looking for legal arguments made by people regarding their plans, not public support. So, screw the spammers, but it's really weird that this is being made into such a huge deal. This isn't a vote, there's no ballot box to stuff. And even in the off chance a Russian made some good legal point about net neutrality, why would that be a bad thing? It feels a lot like this: https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/ Meanwhile, for those following the Russia stories, there's been huge news in the Flynn case, but I see almost no coverage. Well, we'll have to see how it plays out, sure, but the radio silence is just weird.
    - carapace 6y ago
      > They were looking for legal arguments made by people regarding their plans, not public support. Are you sure? My impression was that they were (supposed to be) gauging popular sentiment. An open solicitation for legal arguments from the public at large seems, uh, counter-intuitive to me.
calibas 6y ago
What bugs me the most is that the government either doesn't really want to know who's interfering with the democratic process or they know and they're not telling us. The former implies extreme ignorance, the later implies agency capture to the point the FCC is no longer a public institution.
- lma22 6y ago
  Does it not benefit the current administration?
  - calibas 6y ago
    Big businesses learned long ago that if you back both sides you always win.
    - bmm6o 6y ago
      This particular issue is pretty partisan.
      - calibas 6y ago
        A former Verizon lawyer received unanimous Senate support for an FCC position back when Obama was president. That's what set this all up, I blame both parties for exactly what they did. You can't put industry insiders into top regulatory positions of the very industries they work for, you have to be a drooling moron to not see why that's a bad idea, much less unethical. The fact that both parties are okay with it should speak volumes.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- CerealFounder 6y ago
  I mean, if you dig with any seriousness, it's pretty likely that THEY actually manufactured it.
- glitcher 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rambojazz 6y ago
The original title is "Judge Orders FCC to Hand Over IP Addresses Linked to Fake Net Neutrality Comments"! Removing "Fake" makes it sound like a completely different thing.
- rasengan 6y ago
  Agreed, and that original title is the actual title of the linked article itself.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I understood what was meant with the current title. Not saying it shouldn't be added, but for me it was OK.
- OrgNet 6y ago
  This was probably done because of the (draconian) character limit imposed by HN on post titles... If it was me I would have removed the middle "e" in Addresses to comply.... aka Addrsses
- unishark 6y ago
  Certainly it's not _completely_ different, though it does largely neuter the editorializing that is a main point of the article. What really happened here is a judge orders an agency to comply with the freedom of information act because the agency had not made a sufficient case that it was exempted from doing so in this instance. Doesn't address who is right about the "fakeness" question.
exabrial 6y ago
I have a lot of issues with this. This should have never been recorded by a government agency. Be careful what you wish for.
- wool_gather 6y ago
  Can you elaborate? Identifying yourself (name) is part of the process when submitting a comment anyways. And I don't see why we wouldn't want our government's servers to have logs that can be inspected when we have questions about integrity.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    Do you identify yourself when you vote? Yes. Is your identity recorded with your vote? No.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      This wasn’t a vote. There’s no constitutional protection of “secret comments”
carapace 6y ago
Please put the word "fake" back in the title.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cosmiccatnap 6y ago
The real question that remains is 1. Regardless of the outcome what system is in place to hold Pai or the FCC accountable for this? Practically none that I'm aware of. 2. Can this in any way force them to maintain net neutrality? Probably not
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
Logs get deleted or corrupted all of a sudden
rideontime 6y ago
It's already been discovered that fake comments were generated using personal information found in data breaches. I've lost hope of anybody being held responsible for this obvious fraud. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-fcc-fake-comments-impersonation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f...
- hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago
  Sure, but it’s much more difficult to mass fake IPs for said comments. Which is why this is an important decision. Sure the ISPs could probably pull logs for who said what when, but those IPs won’t even be relevant to their current owners. Anyone mass gaming the comment system, even if using stolen identities, were not going to take the time to post each comment from an individual and unique IP address.

210 points by EndXA 6y ago

This is definitely a touchy subject. As the article notes, this will remove the privacy from all people who commented on net neutrality, but it will also allow 2 NYTimes reporters to try to figure out why there were fake comments that led to the loss of neutrality for the people. The separate question that still needs to be figured out, is who is going to be penalized for lying to the american people and taking away their freedoms [1]? [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-actually-hacked/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-ac...

EndXA 6y ago
The privacy aspect to this is definitely touchy: > The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while [Judge Schofield] didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure. > Regardless, Schofield said she also decided to weigh any hypothetical harm against the potential value of the information to the public. “In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” she said, adding: “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.” The judge also wrote that: > ...despite the privacy concerns raised by the agency, releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption.”
- rasengan 6y ago
  What’s crazy is if you own the ISP (who generally wants to repeal net neutrality) you already know which names are associated with each IP as well as other information since you looked up their credit score among other things.
- warent 6y ago
  This is really great news and I admire the judge's dedication to truth and justice. It makes me wonder how much pressure the judge recieved behind-the-scenes before making this ruling. Excited to see how this develops. Unfortunately I suspect the answer is probably more mundane than anything; e.g. the comments were from a botnet which the FCC lacks technical competence to deal with.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I’m a bit confused about the privacy issue here. Isn’t the (alleged) commenter’s full name and address published along with their comment in the public filing? If the commenter’s address is already published what other information can be gleaned from their IP address? Is the fear that someone could use it to piece together a person’s web history?
  - henryfjordan 6y ago
    The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. Gizmodo failed to link to the actual opinion with this info: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york-times-company-v-federal-communications-commission/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york... Edit: upon reading more, now I'm not sure if the NYT already has the names and addresses and is just seeking the metadata or if they don't need that data to do their analysis. Your guess might have been right, the ruling is unclear.
    - deathanatos 6y ago
      > The New York times isn't seeking the name or address in their request, just some other metadata about each comment including the IP and user agent header. The point of the person you're responding to is that the NYT doesn't need to seek names or addresses, because they're already public information. Anyone can go look up the docket and see them[1]. So, their argument I believe is that, given that the names and addresses of the filers of comments are already publicly available, what further privacy concern is there in releasing IP address information? And there might be one. IP address & UA might further allow me to correlate the user's activity elsewhere; some comments didn't submit names or addresses — IIRC these were "required" but some people filled in the fields with things like "none". There were also allegations that the names of some comments were falsified on comments not in favor of net neutrality. IP address information might lend evidence to or against those allegations. [1]: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC&submissiontype_description=COMMENT https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-...
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  Would a good middle ground would be add some salt to each unique IP, hash the addresses, and hand hashed data over?
  - nightfly 6y ago
    It would make the ip address information useless. What they probably want to do is figure out how many comments came from the same network blocks that were allocated to organizations (to detect large numbers of fake comments). If you hash the ip addresses you can't figure out which ones came from the same network allocation, the most you could do is figure out which comments came from identical ip addresses.
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      True. Bar assigning each hashed ip a block id, the data would be pretty useless. Even then you might still lose out on some important metadata.
duxup 6y ago
Is there any realistic expectation of anonymity when it comes to FCC comments? They usually publish the names of people who commented don't they? I know mine was accessible.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
acdha 6y ago
I don’t think this is actually much of a privacy change. Here’s what you agree to when you submit a comment: > Any comments that you submit to the FCC on a proposed rulemaking, petition, or other document for which public comment is requested will be made public, including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission. We may share non-personally identifiable information with others, including the public, in aggregated form, in partial or edited form, or verbatim. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/how-comment#comments https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/how-comment#comments
- Gaelan 6y ago
  > including any personally identifiable information you include in your submission Wording here is a little ambiguous. As a techie, it's pretty easy to make an argument that the IP address is something I "included" in the submission (it's part of the packets my computer is sending on my behalf), but I'm not sure the average person would read it that way, instead interpreting it as pertaining only to information they explicitly typed into a text box.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Yes, but even in that case how much does it change matters to go from your name, city, state, zip code, email address, etc. to include an IP? I mean, a data miner might be able to tell if you were posting from a house which isn’t yours or using your employer’s network but the entered PII is enough to uniquely identify a large number of people.
- m463 6y ago
  You could probably aggregate the IP addresses in a few ways and even maintain privacy: - how many submissions came from the ISP law offices address block? - how many submissions came from lobby group #12's address block? - which ip addresses had more than 20 unique submissions? then use the results as the basis for investigations. Some results could be benign, some results could be less so.
londons_explore 6y ago
Why not release a randomly selected sample of 100 comments? A random sample should be sufficient to see whats going on, if its sufficiently widespread to affect results.

foob4r 6y ago

Data corruption in 3, 2...

squarefoot 6y ago
"Sorry, we unknowingly purchased crappy SMR disks for storage and backups, and they borked all data after a few resyncs. Blame Western Digital!".

hagemey 6y ago

127.0.0.1

zigzaggy 6y ago
Or probably even 192.168.1.1
Avamander 6y ago
I actually wouldn't be surprised, if this were a reverse-proxied piece of software.
FlyMoreRockets 6y ago
Because there's no place like home.

ikeboy 6y ago

Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue. https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 this WSJ article found thousands of people that said they never posted the comments attributed to them. >One 369-word comment supporting the Obama-era net-neutrality rules was posted on the FCC website more than 300,000 times. One of those was attributed to Gloria Burney, 87, a retired speech therapist in Los Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.” A comment from “Elzor The Blarghmaster” at 9632 Elm Road, Maywood, Ill., was among the 818,000 identical FCC comments backing the Trump policy. No such address could be found, said Jimmie Thompson, a U.S. Postal Service carrier in Maywood. If you've got the impression that the bot compaigns were only from one side, you've just been misled by biased media like OP, which links to prior coverage of one company and doesn't bother to tell you about the broader picture.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ikeboy 6y ago
>He said the FCC received more than 7.5 million comments consisting of the same short-form letter supporting the current rules from about 45,000 unique email addresses, “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website.” He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”
Arubis 6y ago
And of course, if the tinfoil hat mentality is appealing, why not one actor spamming comments for _both_ sides? If said actor prefers one position they can just have a an order-of-magnitude difference in what they submitted; either way, said hypothetical party can be satisfied with eroding public trust in the process.
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Perhaps - my own pet theory is it was just some bored guys on 4chan who did it because they could. The thing is, a lot of the bots didn't submit comments directly, which would have required getting keys to submit in bulk and leave a trail. Instead, they filled out forms on the many sites that were set up to take names and submit form letters to the FCC. So some advocacy org might set up a site and get a million comments, half of them might be legit and half might be from a script kiddy running a database of addresses and names through the site, which then submits it to the FCC. The site has no particular incentive to vet the submissions. Knowing the IP address of the entity who sent the message to the FCC is close to useless, in that scenario.

sloshnmosh 6y ago

I remember that there were websites that allowed users to comment on NN that had pre-made comments already completed. The user only needed to enter a valid email address and could then forward the comment to the FCC or erase and put in their comment in their own words. I could see how this would look like obvious spam if users did not take the time to modify the form into their own thoughts. This shall be very interesting indeed. Pass the popcorn.

carapace 6y ago
The point is whether canned responses came from a "organic" groundswell of concerned citizen or a handful of astroturfers.
- Natsu 6y ago
  Which doesn't make much sense, because the arguments are used in the decision making process, not the number of comments. This wasn't some kind of vote where you could stuff the ballot box, this was somewhere that you could flag items of concern. We all know that anyone could fake an IP address, as well. It would take little thought to spam a bunch of nonsense through a random proxy via a script. But, just like every other kind of spam, it would just get ignored by the recipient. They were looking for legal arguments made by people regarding their plans, not public support. So, screw the spammers, but it's really weird that this is being made into such a huge deal. This isn't a vote, there's no ballot box to stuff. And even in the off chance a Russian made some good legal point about net neutrality, why would that be a bad thing? It feels a lot like this: https://xkcd.com/932/ https://xkcd.com/932/ Meanwhile, for those following the Russia stories, there's been huge news in the Flynn case, but I see almost no coverage. Well, we'll have to see how it plays out, sure, but the radio silence is just weird.
  - carapace 6y ago
    > They were looking for legal arguments made by people regarding their plans, not public support. Are you sure? My impression was that they were (supposed to be) gauging popular sentiment. An open solicitation for legal arguments from the public at large seems, uh, counter-intuitive to me.

calibas 6y ago

What bugs me the most is that the government either doesn't really want to know who's interfering with the democratic process or they know and they're not telling us. The former implies extreme ignorance, the later implies agency capture to the point the FCC is no longer a public institution.

lma22 6y ago
Does it not benefit the current administration?
- calibas 6y ago
  Big businesses learned long ago that if you back both sides you always win.
  - bmm6o 6y ago
    This particular issue is pretty partisan.
    - calibas 6y ago
      A former Verizon lawyer received unanimous Senate support for an FCC position back when Obama was president. That's what set this all up, I blame both parties for exactly what they did. You can't put industry insiders into top regulatory positions of the very industries they work for, you have to be a drooling moron to not see why that's a bad idea, much less unethical. The fact that both parties are okay with it should speak volumes.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
CerealFounder 6y ago
I mean, if you dig with any seriousness, it's pretty likely that THEY actually manufactured it.
glitcher 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rambojazz 6y ago

The original title is "Judge Orders FCC to Hand Over IP Addresses Linked to Fake Net Neutrality Comments"! Removing "Fake" makes it sound like a completely different thing.

rasengan 6y ago
Agreed, and that original title is the actual title of the linked article itself.
lucb1e 6y ago
For what it's worth, I understood what was meant with the current title. Not saying it shouldn't be added, but for me it was OK.
OrgNet 6y ago
This was probably done because of the (draconian) character limit imposed by HN on post titles... If it was me I would have removed the middle "e" in Addresses to comply.... aka Addrsses
unishark 6y ago
Certainly it's not _completely_ different, though it does largely neuter the editorializing that is a main point of the article. What really happened here is a judge orders an agency to comply with the freedom of information act because the agency had not made a sufficient case that it was exempted from doing so in this instance. Doesn't address who is right about the "fakeness" question.

exabrial 6y ago

I have a lot of issues with this. This should have never been recorded by a government agency. Be careful what you wish for.

wool_gather 6y ago
Can you elaborate? Identifying yourself (name) is part of the process when submitting a comment anyways. And I don't see why we wouldn't want our government's servers to have logs that can be inspected when we have questions about integrity.
- exabrial 6y ago
  Do you identify yourself when you vote? Yes. Is your identity recorded with your vote? No.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    This wasn’t a vote. There’s no constitutional protection of “secret comments”

carapace 6y ago

Please put the word "fake" back in the title.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cosmiccatnap 6y ago

The real question that remains is 1. Regardless of the outcome what system is in place to hold Pai or the FCC accountable for this? Practically none that I'm aware of. 2. Can this in any way force them to maintain net neutrality? Probably not

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

Logs get deleted or corrupted all of a sudden

rideontime 6y ago

It's already been discovered that fake comments were generated using personal information found in data breaches. I've lost hope of anybody being held responsible for this obvious fraud. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-fcc-fake-comments-impersonation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-f...

hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago
Sure, but it’s much more difficult to mass fake IPs for said comments. Which is why this is an important decision. Sure the ISPs could probably pull logs for who said what when, but those IPs won’t even be relevant to their current owners. Anyone mass gaming the comment system, even if using stolen identities, were not going to take the time to post each comment from an individual and unique IP address.