New York Times Sues FCC Over Russian Fake Net Neutrality Comments

CYBERSPACE—The mystery over millions of fake comments posted on the Federal Communications Commission website in the run up to the FCC’s vote to repeal net neutrality rules only got deeper last week, when The New York Times filed a lawsuit demanding information on how Russian hackers may have manipulated the public comment process. According to the Washington Post, the FCC received about half-a-million comments from Russian email addresses during the open comment period last year. The Times originally filed a Freedom of Information request in June of 2017 for server logs that would show where the comments came from, but the FCC turnd down that request and claimed that to comply would violate the privacy rights of individuals who made the comments. The Times filed new and narrower versions of the FOIA request on repeated occasions, only to be rebuffed by the Republican-controlled FCC each time. Then, on Septemeber 20 of this year, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against the FCC in the Southen District of New York federal court, accusing the FCC of “throwing up a series of roadblocks” despite the “clear public importance of the requested records.” The Times’ lawsuit goes on to note that, “the FCC's mishandling of the public comment process for the proposed rule has been well documented." In fact, as AVN.com has reported, the FCC lied about an outage on its website in May of 2017, claiming that it was the victim of a hacking attack that shut down the site. But further investigation revealed that the flood of comments came from fans of comedian John Oliver, who called for viewers of his HBO Last Week Tonight show to comment on the site in favor of retaining net neutrality rules. “This litigation involves records that will shed light on the extent to which Russian nationals and agents of the Russian government have interfered with the agency notice-and-comment process about a topic of extensive public interest: the government’s decision to abandon ‘net neutrality,’” the Times lawsuit says. “Release of these records will help broaden the public’s understanding of the scope of Russian interference in the American democratic system.” Even the Russian state-owned propaganda outlet RT has weighed in on The New York Times action, ridiculing the lawsuit and saying that even though the approximately 500,000 comments came from Russian addresses, “there is no evidence Russians actually sent them.”  The FCC continues to claim that turning over information about the comments to the Times would jeopardize its “security.” “We are disappointed that The New York Times has filed suit to collect the Commission’s internal Web server logs, logs whose disclosure would put at jeopardy the Commission’s IT security practices for its Electronic Comment Filing System,” the FCC said in a statement after the Times filed its suit. Photo via Kremlin / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain