
Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments - EndXA
https://gizmodo.com/judge-orders-fcc-to-hand-over-ip-addresses-linked-to-fa-1843202071
======
rasengan
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-
ac...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-actually-
hacked/)

~~~
EndXA
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.”

~~~
elliekelly
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
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...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7906482/33/the-new-york-times-
company-v-federal-communications-commission/)

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
> _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-...](https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC&submissiontype_description=COMMENT)

~~~
awful
Exactly; I was on that list and looked at the db during the intial
controversy. I looked up some of my neighbours, and it was clear to me they
had no obvious connection to the issue, and had in fact very similar or exact
things to say, as I recall. I took it at the time to mean they had gave
someone a proxy to speak for them, maybe some business or political group.

------
rambojazz
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
Agreed, and that original title is the actual title of the linked article
itself.

------
calibas
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.

~~~
glitcher
I seem to recall at the time some pretty clear signaling from Pai and the FCC
that their decisions were really not going to be influenced by the comments no
matter what they contained.

~~~
willis936
His smug demeanor while talking about reading the support for no Net
Neutrality seemed like a victory lap for getting away with short circuiting
the system. He should be put on trial and his emails and texts should be
admissible evidence.

As a reminder: the overwhelming public opinion and media coverage was on
outrage over the fraudulent comments prior to Pai announcing that the public
had shown support for ending Net Neutrality. That alone should be grounds for
having him tried. At what point can you no longer legally get away with
malicious lying for profit? I think he crossed that line, which is impressive.

------
rideontime
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-f...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jsvine/net-neutrality-
fcc-fake-comments-impersonation)

~~~
hardsoftnfloppy
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.

------
sloshnmosh
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
The point is whether canned responses came from a "organic" groundswell of
concerned citizen or a handful of astroturfers.

~~~
Natsu
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
> 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.

~~~
Natsu
Yes, public comment like this is an ordinary part of their rulemaking. You can
see something similar if you read, e.g. the responses to requests for DMCA
exceptions from the Library of Congress. It may seem weird, but plenty of
interested parties have lawyers bring up whatever legal points they wish to
raise.

But that's also why I don't see them paying attention to the wishes of the
general public at all. Most of us aren't lawyers and unless we raise some
legal point, nothing we say actually matters to them at all. I think it's
pretty clear that they went ahead with plans they had from the start.

So whether or not Russians or other foreigners commented in a web form open to
the world or not, I don't see it as having mattered one bit.

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

------
foob4r
Data corruption in 3, 2...

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

------
hagemey
127.0.0.1

~~~
Avamander
I actually wouldn't be surprised, if this were a reverse-proxied piece of
software.

------
exabrial
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
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
Do you identify yourself when you vote? Yes. Is your identity recorded with
your vote? No.

~~~
colejohnson66
This wasn’t a vote. There’s no constitutional protection of “secret comments”

------
ikeboy
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.

~~~
Arubis
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
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.

