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As many as 2 million identities were stolen to leave fake comments in support of the FCC's decision to kill net neutrality, according to the New York Attorney General's Office.
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"This is a 13 year old child -- she did not post this comment, nor did anyone else in her household," a report filed by a New Yorker said. A Chicago resident who also filed a complaint called the fake comment made under their mother's name "sickening." Their mother passed away several years ago from cancer.
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While it's still not clear how the identities were stolen, the Attorney General's Office has at least figured out where the fake comments came from: New York, Florida, Texas and California produced 100,000 fake comments each.
I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.
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Key Findings:
- One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
- There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
- It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
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Organic Public Comments: 99%+ Support Keeping Net Neutrality
It turns out old-school statistics allows us to take a representative sample and get a pretty good approximation of the population proportion and a confidence interval. After taking a 1000 comment random sample of the 800,000 organic comments and scanning through them, I was only able to find three comments that were clearly pro-repeal.
New York's attorney general has been trying to investigate fraud in public comments on the Federal Communications Commission's anti-net neutrality plan but alleges that the FCC has refused to cooperate with the investigation.
NY State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says that "hundreds of thousands of Americans" were likely impersonated in fake comments on the net neutrality docket. But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's office would not provide information needed for New York's investigation, Schneiderman wrote yesterday in an open letter to Pai.
Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’ and other Americans’ identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.
Why am I creating a new thread? I believe this information is lost in the larger Net Neutrality thread, and deserves its own discussion.
As well, we often hear about claims of collusion, corruption, vote tampering, or voter fraud - and while those claims are often hearsay, not currently provable, or just completely made up, this is a direct example of a large-scale campaign by someone to undermine the integrity of our free and open democratic process.
We should care about this because these comments were used as a justification for the unpopular moves that the FCC has taken this week to rescind Net Neutrality regulations (which is very popular among Americans (83%) and even has bipartisan support (3 out 4 Republicans support it)). If this is not addressed, what is to say that we will not be used in the same way in the future to support some other decision?
Whoever orchestrated this stole people's identities. They used the names of people who do not back the FCC's decision, and in some cases even took the names of children or long-deceased people.
This should upset everyone, and should be yet another black eye on this anti-consumer decision by the FCC.
Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said half a million of the fake comments originated from Russian email addresses. She said the issue with the FCC comments calls into question the integrity of the entire public comment process, across the government.
A study has found more than 7.75 million comments were submitted from email domains attributed to FakeMailGenerator.com, and they had nearly identical wording. The FCC says some of the nearly 23 million comments on Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to gut Obama-era rules were filed under the same name more than 90 times each.
And then there were the 444,938 from Russian email addresses, which also raised eyebrows, even though it’s unclear if they were from actual Russian citizens or computer bots originating in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Last edited by HockeyMac18; 12-15-2017 at 04:43 PM..
If you follow some of the analytics of Russian twitter bots, they've really been hammering the net neutrality discussion pretty heavily. At a guess they recognize that the loss of net neutrality will hurt our competitiveness.
If you follow some of the analytics of Russian twitter bots, they've really been hammering the net neutrality discussion pretty heavily. At a guess they recognize that the loss of net neutrality will hurt our competitiveness.
Noting that, out of the 23 million public comments received online, fully one million of those opposing net neutrality have been shown to be a result of identity theft (including that of a U.S. senator), while another half-million have come from IP addresses inside Russia, the commissioner said that the public record is “a mess,” and that “we have to see what’s going on before we vote.”
Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said half a million of the fake comments originated from Russian email addresses. She said the issue with the FCC comments calls into question the integrity of the entire public comment process, across the government.
A study has found more than 7.75 million comments were submitted from email domains attributed to FakeMailGenerator.com, and they had nearly identical wording. The FCC says some of the nearly 23 million comments on Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to gut Obama-era rules were filed under the same name more than 90 times each.
And then there were the 444,938 from Russian email addresses, which also raised eyebrows, even though it’s unclear if they were from actual Russian citizens or computer bots originating in the U.S. or elsewhere.
An example of how this practice can be used to "justify" decisions. Listen to Brendan Carr from the FCC use public input (which we have shown was undermined extensively above) as a supporting material for their decision:
Doubt anyone will ever be held responsible for this. Internet fingerprints are not reliable since they can be faked. Probably Comcast a t and t time warner century link effort.. we will never know
Why am I creating a new thread? I believe this information is lost in the larger Net Neutrality thread, and deserves its own discussion.
As well, we often hear about claims of collusion, corruption, vote tampering, or voter fraud - and while those claims are often hearsay, not currently provable, or just completely made up, this is a direct example of a large-scale campaign by someone to undermine the integrity of our free and open democratic process.
We should care about this because these comments were used as a justification for the unpopular moves that the FCC has taken this week to rescind Net Neutrality regulations (which is very popular among Americans (83%) and even has bipartisan support (3 out 4 Republicans support it)). If this is not addressed, what is to say that we will not be used in the same way in the future to support some other decision?
Whoever orchestrated this stole people's identities. They used the names of people who do not back the FCC's decision, and in some cases even took the names of children or long-deceased people.
This should upset everyone, and should be yet another black eye on this anti-consumer decision by the FCC.
Shocking to see that my kids names are used for over 27 times!!!! They are not very common names but someone could have a similar name of course but my kids never would have written any of the comments. Btw my kids are very happy with Trumps decision and would never have commented this way!
Shocking to see that my kids names are used for over 27 times!!!! They are not very common names but someone could have a similar name of course but my kids never would have written any of the comments. Btw my kids are very happy with Trumps decision and would never have commented this way!
They must work for an ISP. Otherwise, they are literally cheering against their own best interests (this is not hyperbolic).
Although, you just quickly highlighted very quickly how significant this commenting processes was undermined. I'm sorry to hear about your kids being taken advantage of.
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