Court To FCC: Cough Up Data In Net Neutrality Fake Comment Affair

WASHINGTON, D.C.—As the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission last year steamed toward a December vote at which the FCC ultimately repealed Obama-era net neutrality regulations—rules the shielded internet traffic from being blocked or slowed by big internet service providers—the Commission's website was flooded by millions of comments, many supporting the repeal of the rules.  But as it turned out, about two million of those comments were fake, sent from accounts using stolen identities of actual Americans, including at least two United States senators. The FCC has so far refused to produce any documentation that could show where the phony comments actually came from, but that is about to change. A federal judge on the Washington, D.C. District Court last week ordered the FCC, led by Donald Trump-appointed chair Ajit Pai, to release at least some of that data to an independent journalist, according to the tech news site TechDirt.  Freelance reporter Jason Prechtel filed a Freedom of Information request with the FCC in June of last year, requesting the data on the fake comments. When the FCC gave him the runaround, refusing to release any of the data, Prechtel sued. Now, about 10 months after the journalist filed his lawsuit, federal judge Christopher Cooper ordered the FCC to turn over a list of email addresses that were used to submit the comments in bulk, according to Broadcasting & Cable.  The email addresses were used to submit .CSV files, which are essentially spreadsheets which contain large amounts of data—in this case, multiple net neutrality comments. Using the .CSV files, whoever was attempting to game the system with fake comments was able to post hundreds or even thousands of comments in a single submission. "In addition to enabling scrutiny of how the Commission handled dubious comments during the rulemaking, disclosure would illuminate the Commission's forward-looking efforts to prevent fraud in future processes,” Cooper wrote in his 24-page ruling. “It is surely in the public interest to further the oversight of agency action to protect the very means by which Americans make their voices heard in regulatory processes.” Prechtel, in a blog post on Tuesday, noted that, “I didn’t get everything I asked for. The judge ruled against my request for logs from the FCC’s servers that would provide further details about which specific email addresses posted which bulk .CSV comments to their system.” The freelance journalist also noted that he currently has no set date for receiving the files, and the court ordered that he “meet and confer” with the FCC about how to receive the .CSV files—if the commission actually still possesses them. Photo by Slowking/Wikimedia Commons