Surprising no one who was paying attention. Similarly there will be no consequences to this action, which will also not come as a surprise to anyone who was paying attention.
I agree the possibly criminal behavior in the NN repeal has been known for a long time, but the fact the FBI actually believe it's criminal enough to investigate is definitely new.
guess the Telecoms or their lobbyists hired some small sketchy 3rd party PR/astroturfing firms to do this, and those people will take the fall but blow back to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon will be minimal. Eventually some judge will chastise the FCC in a ruling, while also doing nothing to overturn the policy change, but perhaps forcing some vague fixes for the commenting system going forward.
Let's not pretend most crimes result in punishment, especially at this level of business and government. Cynicism sucks, but I prefer it to blissful ignorance.
How many suspected crimes at this level, once investigated, end up with no significant consequences to the suspects? How does that rate compare to crime in general?
> In it, the commission voted not to release the records that the news organizations had requested: data from web server logs that could shed additional light on the suspicious comments.
Evidence very probably exists to show the faked comments accessed the FCC unpublished API to bypass the web form. I wonder if these server logs still exist...
It would be interesting to compare the list of names against some of the large recent data leaks as well, to see if it may have been (possibly) an independent actor trying to influence the request.
Also, if half of these are _super_ fake, the server logs should be quite revealing.
They are required to consider them by law. What you're saying is that cheating is ok, and laws can be ignored.
They may be routinely ignored, but there is a price to pay for ignoring the law. Even parking tickets you can brush off for a while but you'll pay (a lot) later.
Or is something different for this administration?
This is absolutely true, and also doesn't matter. There should be a record that the FCC proceeded over overwhelming public objection, and the content of that objection. If there was fraud to disguise that public sentiment, there should be a record of that, too, and a punishment.
I'm hopeful that things will change for the better, but I'm curious how often congressional investigations ever amount to action, especially within the last decade.
>If the comments matter only because the law requires them, that's a very weak argument.
If the law requires that they be considered in the process of creating policy, then fraudulently spamming comments is a direct attempt to subvert the policy making function of the FCC.
We cavalierly assume the comments do not matter because of an underlying assumption; that FCC Chair Pai will not actually consider them regardless of their contents, and that he functionally controls the decision to enact or repeal NN regulations. Imagine if we had a different FCC chair - would the comments still not matter?
There are two problems preventing the comments from fulfilling their intended function, but the existence of a second problem (Pai's refusal to discharge the duties of his office honorably) does not negate the first (the fraudulent corruption of the public comments record).
>If the law requires that they be considered in the process of creating policy, ...
The important distinction here is that they have to be considered as comments, not votes. For example, if a whole lot of comments say more or less the same thing, then that only counts as one comment. In this case the politics had already been decided so no comment could affect the general outcome. In a very real sense the comments did not matter in this case. In other situations they can matter.
The pointless distraction related to the various attempts to spam the FCC comments in the end prevented actual politics that could of possibly retained net neutrality.
The premise that a someone went to lengths to fabricate a substantial portion of them would indicate that the comments do in fact matter to somebody, specifically somebody with a vested interest against NN.
Seems like any _hacker_ could code a python script to scrape publicly available data (White pages) using selenium / beautiful soup and use that data to post comments. Captchas can be solved for pennies.
FCC comments not mattering is not a problem either, IMO.
Even if they did matter - the spam comments are largely the same as reddit or HN spam i.e. as long as they can be filtered out it doesn't really matter.
We said please no personal attacks or we would ban the account, so we have. If you'd like to use this site as intended please email hn@ycombinator.com.
Federal agencies are required by law to request input from the public on policy changes. They are supposed to respond to this input when possible, though they are not necessarily restricted by it.
The FCC is legally required to pay attention to the public comments before enacting a major policy change. It's essentially identity fraud to an official government entity.
To quote the dissenting opinion - "roughly half a million comments were filed from Russian e-mail addresses.
Something here is rotten".
If this happened in an election, there would be rioting in the streets. This is blatant interference.
The news is the FBI investigation. The NYT is completely shut out of the data, but apparently it's drawn enough attention to get some actual muscle behind it finally.
Even at that rate, I still think some form of net neutrality has to exist in the absence of decent broadband competition and/or municipal fiber being laid everywhere in the US...
Or vote for someone you actually believe in even if they are not likely to win. Maybe I'm crazy but I believe voting for the lesser of two evils is just perpetuating a terrible two party system here in the USA. One way to change it is support candidates outside of the two party system even if they are unlikely to win. With enough support eventually they will be able to.
> Or vote for someone you actually believe in even if they are not likely to win. Maybe I'm crazy but I believe voting for the lesser of two evils
No you are not crazy, you just haven't studied the game theory of voting. In our old, outdated first-past-the-post voting system voting, according to game theory you should vote for the less or 2 evils. A vote for a 3rd party that has no chance of winning is no different than not voting at all. Most people intuitively get this, which is why we are stuck with a 2 party system.
There are better more democratic system like Maine's rank choice voting. There you can safely vote for your favorite candidate without worrying about the spoiler effect. If you want to learn more:
I understand why voting for a third party that has no chance of winning is like casting no vote. But I'm not talking about this election or next election. I'm thinking about how to change our messed up polarized political system. It's not going to happen without major changes, one of which is getting away from the two party system.
How do we do that? People get fed up and vote for the third party even if they know they wont win. Next election a few more people do the same. Even though the candidate they voted for isnt going to win. The next election a few more... and eventually change.
Really if I view my two options as awful I'd rather vote for someone I actually want or no one at all. If someone offers me a nasty drink with a rotten vegetable floating in it and a nasty drink with a rotten fruit in it I'm not going to drink the one with the fruit just because it's a little less gross than the other.
If every person who voted for Johnson or Stein in 2016, which is what you’re advocating, had voted for Clinton, then she would’ve won the election and net neutrality would still be alive.
If half of the country who didnt vote at all voted for Cilton she'd be president. Don't yell at people who cast their vote for who they wanted to win. Work on getting the half of our country who didnt vote to vote.
That would not have happened because many people who voted for Johnson would have, if he had not been around, voted Republican. Libertarian ideals are considered acceptable, even attractive, by many Republicans, especially the financial and anti-regulation side. Admittedly there are very few who would have voted for Trump as an alternative to Stein, had she not been around.
> 100% of Stein voters and 24% of Johnson voters in Florida would've flipped that state.
... assuming that the remaining 76% of Johnson voters abstained.
If 50% of libertarians and 100% of green voters voted Democrat, and the other 50% of libertarians voted Republican, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have gone to the Democrats, and nothing else would have changed.
If 30% of libertarians and 100% of green voters voted Democrat, and the other 70% of libertarians voted Republican, New Hampshire would have gone to the Republicans, and nothing else would have changed.
I suspect 30% is closer than 50% in terms of how many libertarians would have voted Republican if there was no libertarian option.
// What fraction of Libertarians would vote Republican if they had
// to choose between Democrats and Republicans
var fracLToD = 0.3, fracLToR = 1 - fracLToD;
// Same for Greens
var fracGToD = 1.0, fracGToR = 1 - fracGToD;
// Find the table
var electionResultsTable = [].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('table.wikitable'))
.filter(t => t.querySelector('thead tr th.headerSort') && t.querySelector('thead tr th.headerSort').textContent.match(/^State/))[0];
// Process
[].slice.call(electionResultsTable.querySelectorAll('tr')) // Get rows
.slice(2, -1) // Chop off header and footer
.map(row => [].slice.call(row.querySelectorAll('td')).map(td => td.textContent)) // Get cell contents
.map(cs => ({
"state":cs[0],
"d":parseInt(cs[2].replace(/,/g, ''))||0, // democrats
"r":parseInt(cs[5].replace(/,/g, ''))||0, // republicans
"l":parseInt(cs[8].replace(/,/g, ''))||0, // libertarians
"g":parseInt(cs[11].replace(/,/g, ''))||0 // greens
})) // grab the cols we care about
.map(({state,d,r,l,g}) => ({
state,
d,
r,
l,
g,
// winnerWith3 is the winner as-is, with third parties
winnerWith3:d > r ? 'd' : 'r',
// winnerNo3 is the winner as-is, with third parties
winnerNo3:d + l * fracLToD + g * fracGToD > r + l * fracLToR + g * fracGToR ? 'd' : 'r'
}))
// And grab the states where excluding third parties would have changed the results
.filter(({winnerWith3, winnerNo3}) => winnerWith3 != winnerNo3)
> Libertarian ideals are considered acceptable, even attractive, by many Republicans
They're attractive as stump speeches platitudes about limited government and lower taxation. The second they're in office, there's suddenly lots of cash available for increased defense spending, agricultural subsidies and funding prosecutions for non-violent drug crimes.
Why would Ajit Pai be put in jail for stuffed public comments? Do you think he personally ordered them? I doubt that. Personally ordering the stuffing operations is far more likely to have been done by executives of the affected companies. (And it's even more likely that nobody personally ordered stuffing operations. "It sure would be a tragedy if some misfortune came to $NAME" isn't just a movie cliche.)
It's fairly obvious that Ajit Pai knew exactly what was happening, and he acted in bad faith by letting it happen.
My bet is that he signed off on things that he knew to be false, and that he exhibited willful negligence. In the process, he has likely acted unlawfully. His ultimate conviction might be fraud... hard to tell at this point until the FBI digs through everything.
He didn't just let it happen, he actively concealed it when he lied to Congress about it. At the very least he's an accessory after the fact under the government's favorite prosecution crutch: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The FCC must "consider" the comments. The comments can then be ignored. All tidy and legal.
If the FCC was "considering" known forged comments then it is probably actionable, even if the result is the same. If the FCC never considered the comments (which is most likely) then that's actionable, too.
[There's some quote about the Odyssey not being written by Homer, but another person with the same name...]
If it's anything like the Brazilian process (and it probably is, because we explicitly copied it from the US), there should be a document somewhere that relates each comment, says if it caused any change and explains why it caused or not a change.
Serious question: Why is everyones reaction to put {executive} in jail?
People don't understand that corporations, and to a larger extent, governments, are Medusa. You can cut a snake off, but there are more, who were trained by {executive}. (And it doesn't actually stop the {bad_practice} from happening; the head wasn't cut off.) (And for those who really want the myth, the head still turned people to stone, IE 'we've always done it this way.')
Don't get me wrong; as a net-isizen, I want Pai to rot in hell for everything he's done, but what is the rational behind putting people in jail?
USA already has enough people incarcerated from tiny drug charges; what makes this any better? Throwing people in jail won't solve anything, so why is that the biggest reaction to stuff like this?
> Why is everyones reaction to put {executive} in jail?
Because the current set of disincentives to act in this way are not adequate, and we further recognize that this is not a new problem.
> but what is the rational behind putting people in jail?
I think the hope is that these people will see the oversized punishment and avoid taking jobs in government service that seem to be taken exclusively to benefit their own agendas rather than to perform any public service.
> what makes this any better?
It actually stands a chance of modifying the behavior of the target group. It's a disincentive that they almost certainly don't want to face, as opposed to drug addicts who see it as a temporary inconvenience to their _addiction_. Are you suggesting that these executives are suffering from an addiction issue?
> so why is that the biggest reaction to stuff like this?
Because we've been watching this happen over and over again for years and we're sick of it being an issue. It's an over-reaction to be sure, but it's well justified given our history of failures here.
Putting people in jail for doing bad things is a signal to future people who want to do those bad things that they will suffer consequences for it. This will make them rethink doing those things. AKA "deterrence"
If people can do these things and get away with it, why wouldn't they? They make billions of dollars doing this and have no chance of suffering any negative consequences. If you were in a room with a billion dollars on the table and you knew you'd be free to take it and no one would ever come after you for it, wouldn't you take it?
> You can cut a snake off, but there are more, who were trained by {executive}
If your boss told you to do a bunch of things, and then got thrown in jail for doing exactly those things, are you saying that you would keep on doing them? Most people wouldn't.
It's not merely fake comments. It's fake comments used by a small group of people to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
I'm sure the reference to the death penalty is being hyperbolic, but this is a little different from some kid pretending to be a Navy Seal to sound like a tough guy.
I love the fact that one person is correcting me it's hyperbolic, and another is telling me yes I want actual executions. And the downvotes from probably both of you.
There are big corporations doing much more despicable things then registering fake comments over net neutrality. Hyperbole or not, calling for the guillotine over fake comments against net neutrality is over the top compared to say fossil fuel companies and their liability related to global warming, or pharmaceuticals extorting patients for medicines like insulin or the epi-pen. That I could understand wanting the guillotine. Not fake net neutrality comments.
Here's the deal. I am PRO NET NEUTRALITY. I hate that Ajit Pai did away with it. He may have colluded with the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world to get rid of it, he might have just opened the door for them to do what they did. It's awfully hard to prove if he did help post fake comments. I doubt he cared what was in them to begin with. I suspect most people knew those comments were fake, it was just a smoke screen for doing what the big companies wanted.
For what it's worth, I didn't downvote. And to clarify, it's not the guillotine for fake comments, so much as using money and power for inherently anti-social motives. The wants of the few should never trump the needs of the many.
Eventually the many will get fed-up, and the few will become the none.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebaity comments to Hacker News? It's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do that repeatedly.
In this case, manipulating government regulations by submitting false comments. If it's proved that companies fraudulently submitted comments to create the appearance of a grassroots sentiment that did not exist, specifically in order to obtain favorable regulations that would enrich them, don't you think that someone should go to jail for that?
Are there any credible allegations that Ajit Pai, or any other government employees were behind any false comments?
Because I haven't seen any such claims. It seems to me that people are demanding he be put in jail for drafting and voting for a regulation they disagree with.
I honestly don't know what role, if any, Pai specifically may have had. This is why we have a justice system - to investigate crimes and hold trials to determine if someone committed a crime or not.
I agree he should not be put in jail solely on the basis of allegations from the Internet. I don't think anyone is proposing that.
I assume that person believes that, as former general counsel of a major telecom company and then head of the FCC, if there were wrongdoing, Pai would have been aware of it, if not involved. Do you think that's an unreasonable assumption? Even if it happened without his knowledge, he's the leader so it's ultimately his responsibility.
In the best case, we could say he was negligent in assessing the validity of the comments that were submitted to his agency. After all, subsequent investigations have been able to determine the comments were fraudulent, so why didn't he?
If he knew they were fake and just ignored that fact because they supported what he wanted to do anyway, that's another thing. If he was being compensated in some backdoor way from the industry for ignoring that the comments were fake, that's yet another thing. These are things that should be investigated.
Ok, see if I were a government official in charge of reviewing comments from the public, I would consider it my responsibility to ensure that those comments were an accurate reflection of public sentiment and had not been manipulated by an interested party to benefit themselves.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about what sorts of responsibilities government officials have.
As a rule, bureaucrats are not concerned with public opinion. The comments are there for a technical analysis of merit, it is very common for a political process to not take very obvious and large flaws into account, and the public comments are there for fixing this.
That said, wether there was some crime or not is an orthogonal issue.
It was incredibly obvious to anyone paying attention that they were manipulated. 2.8 million comments were identical and were from a pro-net neutrality site called "Battle for the Net". That's not organic.
Do you think he should have blocked comments from there? Or what, specific, actions should he have taken?
> 2.8 million comments were identical and were from a pro-net neutrality site called "Battle for the Net". That's not organic.
Lots of advocacy groups offered a form for users to submit comments with a pre-filled comment field in support of net neutrality. I used one myself. The fact that the text is the same does not necessarily imply the comment is fake.
There are many other comments where the person who supposedly submitted the comment says that they didn't. That would be a fake comment.
> Or what, specific, actions should he have taken?
I don't know, how about something besides "not a damn thing"? How about tracking down the source of the fake comments and fining or otherwise holding them accountable if it's within his jurisdiction to do so, or turning them over to the appropriate authorities if not? How about cancelling the comment period due to the rampant fraud, implementing some measures to verify user and re-opening comments to try to get something accurate? How about giving the tiniest shit about the public he's supposed to be serving? Is that too much ask?
You seem to be operating under a severe misunderstanding of the point of the public comment system. It is not to figure out whether or not the public supports a particular action. Polls are much better at that particular goal. Rather, the purpose is to surface relevant arguments so the committee can consider those arguments in their decisions.
> Rather, the purpose is to surface relevant arguments so the committee can consider those arguments in their decisions.
And would you say that having one side flood the system with millions of fraudulent comments is conducive to this purpose? Before you object, yes it was overwhelmingly one side. FTA of the 14 organizations being investigated, 11 were anti-NN and only 3 are pro.
If what you say were true, all they should have had to do was submit their one comment with their best argument against net neutrality so that the committee could consider it. Surely their sound argument would be enough to win the day, right?
But that's not what they did, is it? Instead of submitting one argument, they tried to overload the system. It's almost as if they wanted to prevent the committee from considering the other side's argument, rather than presenting their own, isn't it? Does that sound like a healthy, functional democracy to you? Is that the sort of tactic that you would like to have deciding how our government is run?
I think basically all the sites that facilitated bulk comments are pointless. Can't think of any cases where bulk comments made a difference (outside petitions are a different story, although they're more useful to make obscure issues get noticed by politicians than for changing positions).
But I think portraying this as part of some broad conspiracy is a stretch. In theory the fraudulent ones (as opposed to the merely manipulated ones facilitated by websites giving one side of the issue) could have been placed by one bored teen script kiddy. I agree it should be investigated, but I don't think there's reason to demonize Pai for that.
Weird, I happened to submit that page to HN and it shot to the top of the front page and stayed there for most of a day. I guess the originators rigged all the HN votes too. You presume good faith on the part of Pai and his affiliations in withholding information from the public about the FCC comment submissions, while simultaneously disputing the right of pro-NN actors to organize and equating such organization with fraudulent submissions.
You directly stated that an effort to solicit and organize submissions means that those submissions were not organic (despite them being initiated by real people), the implication being that those submissions are therefore invalid. What exactly was misrepresented there?
And none of those submissions were "initiated by real people" as you claim - they were initiated by the organization, with the support of people some of whom were real (if you think out of millions of people every single one gave their real name, you're naive).
I know that my submission through Battle for the Net's site was indeed initiated by a real person (unless you're claiming I ain't a real person). There's little reason to believe that wasn't the case for the other posts, either (unless you do have specific evidence of that).
At least per the stated/apparent design of BffN's site, there was a 1:1 ratio between submitted comments to the FCC and someone explicitly requesting "yes, please submit this comment on my behalf". If you have evidence contradicting BffN's claimed mode of operation, then let's hear it.
As far as I know, they did no real name verification of submissions. Unless you think it's plausible that 2.8 million people all gave real names in absence of any verification, it's clear at least some submissions had fake names/were submitted by people that didn't put their own name.
So, BattlefortheNet submitted close to 3 million pro-NN comments but without any sort of identity verification, while the cable providers are accused of submitting up to 9.5 million comments and misusing the identities of real people.
I'm sure some comments were submitted via pseudonyms, the same way you and I post under pseudonyms as opposed to one of us representing ourselves as Ajit Pai, a real person who happens to be FCC chair. It's possible some battleofthenet-originated comments involved fake names that were similarly misappropriated but there doesn't seem to be any body of people complaining about that having happened to them, in contrast to the anti-NN comment submissions.
Now if you have any evidence of such an effort, I encourage you to publish or submit it to investigators. But if you don't, it looks like you're trying to undermine the investigation of a big thing by complaining about the potential failings of a smaller thing.
>The Journal found instances of fakes that favored antiregulation stances but also comments mirroring consumer-groups’ pro-regulation talking points, posted without permission of people whose names were on 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.”
4,622 people told the WSJ they didn't submit the comment in their name that said "The FCC's open Internet rules (net neutrality rules) are extremely important to me." (this was the Battleforthenet text)
If only there were some way to refer back to the article we're commenting on about that very topic. Perhaps you missed it in your hurry to post a barrage of unresponsive replies.
Right, but using a pseudonym is a very different situation from using the name of someone who's dead, which is in turn a very different situation from using the name of someone who's alive and actually holds the opposite position.
If the FCC's checking against some list of real names when validating comments, then the BftN-collected comments that didn't use a real name wouldn't go through anyway. If the FCC's not checking against some list of real names, then BtfN possibly getting submissions from people using nicknames is the least of the FCC's worries.
Battle for the Net's comments were each initiated by a real person (like myself). There was a default message that users could either use as-is or edit/replace.
The comments under investigation were outright fake (e.g. using the identities of deceased persons, among other situations where it's demonstrable that the person identified as the "author" of the comment did not actually authorize it).
I'm responding to parent's reference to "ensure that those comments were an accurate reflection of public sentiment and had not been manipulated by an interested party to benefit themselves", not the investigation.
This is silly. When Nixon was impeached, future Presidents didn't keep bugging their political opponents' hotel rooms in some Medusa-like fashion. When J. Edgar Hoover died, the Senate put in mandatory term limits on FBI directors, they didn't just appoint more jedgars. When Napolean was exiled, his revolution died... And when he escaped exile, it returned in full force.
We aren't helpless to sanction the powerful and thereby change policies and practices. Sure, sometimes you need a few shots at it — sometimes it really is a machine — but changing the head does in fact change the organization. If you want a closer-to-home example, just look at Uber under Dara vs Uber under Travis.
The whole point of putting people to jail is to discourage behavior. This is exactly what it's for.
May very well be that there's someone in line waiting to be the next Ajit Pai, but what are they gonna do if they just watched five other people go to jail for what they might've tried to do?
We used to throw white collar criminals in jail all the time. Over a thousand bankers were convicted and many jailed during the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 80s. Their harm to the financial system did far more to damage society than weed dealers.
America just doesn’t prosecute and jail white collar criminals anymore, which is why it may seem odd to you that people call for jailing white collar criminals.
For every Martin Shkreli that actually gets prison time, far too many wealthy and powerful people get away with doing great harm to society; if it doesn’t involve blood or drugs, they go home to their families.
During the savings and loans scandal, we convicted over a thousand people. Even if they committed the most minor infraction. I'd argue it cleaned up the banking industry for 20 years.
Jail and a felony conviction which permanently destroys your career is a big motivator. Fines and not admitting wrong doing is as much risk as gambling in Vegas with a lot better odds.
Please define {executive}. A business executive is different from a government official. How do we ensure that an unelected government official does not (continue) to engage in nefarious activity?
The corporation as an entity may not care that an executive got thrown in prison, but the guy who replaced him will think twice before making the same decisions his predecessor did.
Voting should be the only way to influence government. Emailing representatives, posting comments on message boards, and protesting in the streets all give an unfair voice to people who have more free time.
