A Bot Is Flooding The FCC Website With Fake Anti-Net Neutrality Comments... In Alphabetical Order
from the faux-outrage dept
As previously noted, the FCC has begun fielding comments on its plan to dismantle net neutrality protections. As of the writing of this post, nearly 556,000 users have left comments on the FCC's plan to roll back the rules, which will begin in earnest with a likely 2-1 partisan vote on May 18. The lion's share of that comment total were driven by John Oliver's recent rant on HBO. Many others are the result of what I affectionately call "outrage-o-matic" e-mail campaigns by either net neutrality activists or think tanks that let people comment without having to expend calories on original thought.
Earlier in the week I was looking through the comments and noted how a large number of them all made the exact same (aggressively inaccurate) claim:
"The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years."
FCC net neutrality proceeding being bombarded with form letter anti-net neutrality comments today. pic.twitter.com/HEto47VY1A
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) May 9, 2017
This in and of itself didn't seem like that big a deal, given the aforementioned campaigns often let commenters quickly file a form letter with the agency.
But it was notable that if this was a form letter, the people who were filling it out magically organized themselves in perfect alphabetical order. And when ZDNet decided to do a deeper dive into these alphabetical duplicate comments, they found that they appear to be produced by a bot that's grabbing the names from somewhere (perhaps public voter registration records or a previous data breach). What's more, the reporter managed to get a hold of many of the folks that purportedly filed the comments, and found several that state they never filed the comments in question, and have no idea what net neutrality even is:
"We reached out to two-dozen people by phone, and we left voicemails when nobody picked up. A couple of people late Tuesday called back and confirmed that they had not left any messages on the FCC's website. One of the returning callers specifically said they didn't know what net neutrality was. A third person reached in a Facebook message Tuesday also confirmed that they had not left any comments on any website."
Numerous Reddit users also spotted the bot campaign, and noted the language used by the 128,000 (and counting) phony commenters was pulled from a 2010 press release by the Center for Individual Freedom, which does not appear to be driving the comments with a corresponding campaign. As of this writing, nobody has identified the driver of the bot, and the FCC has stated it doesn't comment on public proceeding input.
ISPs do have a history of trying to artificially pad anti-net neutrality sentiment, since finding a critical mass of people who blindly support policies that only help companies like Comcast can be... difficult. As Vice News pointed out in 2014, a lobbying organization named the DCI Group (which receives funding from Verizon) paid individuals to flood websites and the FCC comment system with anti-net neutrality sentiement. Whether the work of a similar group, think tank, or other organization, you just know you have a quality argument when you need to pay people (or bot masters) to support your position.
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Filed Under: bots, fake comments, fcc, net neutrality
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And will I get that corner office? Oh and there was a typo in that speech your wrote for me. It's P A I not P I E.
thanks. " /click
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We don't care if you can show us this is a scam, they support what we want to do so we won't look. We won't comment so it won't bite us in the ass later, but people are going to raise questions about why we decided to ignore someone stuffing the ballot box. This is how government works, whoever pays the most gets what they want & we are totally fine with them using citizens as bots in their army.
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YES!
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In any case, the fact that they have to resort to bots while the net neutrality supporters just needed to raise awareness to get tons of people to mobilize speaks tons of how pro-consumer current FCC activities are.
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Re: I know that you know, that I know, that you know, that I know, that you know, that I know, that you know...
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Was surprised there was no Captcha in place...
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Regardless, I'm sure that Pai plans to claim the spam bot comment totals as though it were actual support for his position on eliminating net neutrality down the road. No tactic is too low for Verizon lawyers.
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stuffing the ballot box won't change Pai's decision; it's the stuffing of the wallet
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Found a typo!
... or was it intentional?
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You know what is what when you see it! The net neutrality people are such a bunch of sore losers.
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Re: Was surprised there was no Captcha in place...
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Re: Was surprised there was no Captcha in place...
This case looks like the guy(s) running the bot(s) is doing some misrepresentation and several other not very legal things which would make for another reason for not acting: The case is referred to the police and will be dealt with as a criminal case. In such a situation the false comments are evidence...
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Re: Was surprised there was no Captcha in place...
A lot of those discriminate against certain groups the federal government isn't allowed to discriminate against, such as blind people. (Some have an audio option, but those don't always work. I've never once solved Recaptcha's audio version.)
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Or perhaps it was a pro-neutrality person trying to imperson an anti-neutrality person trying to impersonate a pro-neutrality person trying to discredit the anti-neutrality, who would try to discredit the pro-neutrality, therefore trying to discredit the anti-neutrality.
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The other usecase for differentiated lines is the "priority lane" where certain traffic takes priority. That is, even more shady since "why avoid congestion?" and " why not sell priority lanes?" puts ISPs in a spot where they save money from ensuring congestion on the user-side and earns money from the congestion by selling priority lanes for internet companies. A free market with free throttling has more holes for abuse than a sieve.
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Will Leigh Edit This post too?
If they are smart enough to steal identities (obtain a good list from somewhere) you would think they would be smart enough to have some variances in the message sent. Sending identical messages is pretty much assuring that you will get spotted.
Looks like the pro-NN crew trying to sandbag the anti forces by making them look like they are "cheating" the system.
Someone is working way too hard to have screwed up the messages like that.
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Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged
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NN is "the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites."
So TOR, VPNs are guaranteed not be messed with. 24hr manning? that's going on already.
A DDOS involving a network is likely has a client as the target. DDOS packets are identifiable and can be dropped at the client or with the ISP's help. No issue there.
ISP can ensure no congestion by upgrading their switches, router and core routers. At 15k a pop, it's chump change to an ISP.
There is no free market with ISPs right now. You have at best 2 ISPs to choose from. Hike that to 5 and then you have the begining of a free market.
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I don't think that's quite correct.
There are at least three facets to the principle of network neutrality:
Network neutrality is the principle that "the network should be utterly indifferent to the contents and nature of the traffic passing over it" - that it should be content-, source-, and destination-neutral. A dumb pipe, in other words.
(It would be possible to modify that somewhat, by agreeing on adjustments to the transport protocols whereby a given packet can request classification into "high throughput" or "low latency" or similar transport pools - but as far as I'm aware that hasn't been done, and even if it does happen, the maximum limit of what the network should care about is what the packet itself is requesting.)
That should still leave room for traffic shaping, to rein in usage spikes which threaten to choke the pipes enough to prevent some traffic from getting through at all - as long as that shaping is applied to all traffic passing through the relevant bottlenecks, irrespective of source, destination, or content.
That in turn should make it possible to address DDOS attacks, at least to some limited extent (and I might argue that if the cost of relaxing those limits is the loss of neutrality, the benefit of avoiding DDOS attacks at this layer is not worth it).
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My point of DDOS is that NN doesn't cause an issue with DDOS and that bottlenecks can be addressed with little effort on the ISP's part.
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Re: Will Leigh Edit This post too?
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