Report Falsely Blames The EFF For Fraudulent Net Neutrality Comments
from the extremely-greasy-shenanigans dept
So we've discussed at length how somebody is gaming the FCC's comment system, using a bot to post hundreds of thousands of fake comments in support of the agency's plan to kill net neutrality. We've also made it pretty clear that the FCC doesn't appear interested in doing much about this, because these bogus (and in some instances dead) people "support" the FCC's plan to gut consumer protections governing the already uncompetitive broadband market.
I've had some first-hand experience with the FCC's apathy, given I've been trying to get them to remove (or even address) a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming I run an "unregistered PAC" and am upset that Title II "diminished broadband investment, stifled innovation, and left American consumers potentially on the hook for a new broadband tax" (none of which is true, it should go without saying). While the agency says it's looking into my complaint, you simply don't get the sense that tackling public proceeding comment fraud will be a top agency priority anytime soon.
Initial analysis of the FCC comments suggest it's largely the anti-net neutrality side that's been engaged in chicanery at any real scale. But in an obvious attempt to try and deflate that media narrative, there's a growing attempt to insist that massive, industrialized abuse of the FCC's net neutrality comment docket is something both sides are engaged in. For example, a report released last week (pdf) by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) policy and lobbying think tank proclaimed that "hundreds of thousands" of bogus pro net neutrality comments were filed with the FCC, most of them coming from the EFF.
A report over at the Daily Caller quickly parroted the report's findings:
"More than 100,000 comments supporting government regulation of the internet appear to have been automatically submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a left-leaning nonprofit, according to a forensic analysis published Wednesday.
The responses likely did not come organically from real people, which the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) forum for public comment on net neutrality is intended to be for, according to The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC). Rather, the NLPC claims the comments seem to be artificially submitted by the EFF since language used is highly similar to EFF’s submission platform and both the email addresses and the physical addresses of the listed people are fake, or don’t exist.
But in an amusing takedown over at the EFF website, the group calls the NLPC's analysis "false" and "flawed." The original NLPC report claims that the EFF used the agency's own Dear FCC form letter website to file around 100,000 comments using fake names and e-mail addresses. But the EFF dissected its own data from this period to highlight that this claim simply wasn't true:
"So how do we know NLPC’s report is wrong? For one thing, we counted the number of comments people have submitted to the FCC through our system. That number is nowhere near the 100,000 comments NLPC said we filed.
Further, just before the sunshine period—when the FCC stopped accepting comments—we started storing copies of comments submitted through our system, because we weren’t sure how the FCC would treat comments submitted during that period. This week, we searched through all of the stored comments for the names and email address domains listed in NLPC’s report, and didn’t find a single match."
Additional analysis of the data found that whoever did submit the 100,000 or so comments, didn't even use the EFF's own tool. An errant apostrophe (the FCC's system uses "right single quotation marks" while the submitted comments used a neutral "typewriter apostrophe") indicates the text was copied and pasted from the EFF site, but wasn't submitted from the EFF's tool itself:
"Why does the difference matter? Because it shows that whoever submitted the 100,000 identical comments the NLPC report mentions copied and pasted the text to make the comments look like they came through EFF’s DearFCC.org site, when they did not. If NLPC had looked closely at the comments they would have noticed the difference, and realized that the comments weren’t generated by EFF’s website. Apparently, they did not."
So according to the EFF's analysis, someone cut and pasted a part of the EFF's own form letter, then submitted it using fake names, e-mail addresses and physical addresses more than 100,000 times. Now it's entirely possible that somebody in favor of net neutrality thought they were "helping" by engaging in this behavior (though given the rules' popularity, it's not really necessary). But it's also entirely possible (having watched telecom lobbyists for the better part of two decades) that someone did this as an attempt to make net neutrality supporters look bad, and overshadow media reports of the bot being used to stuff the ballot box.
You'll note that the lobbying and policy think tank behind the report, the National Legal and Policy Center, opposes net neutrality -- and didn't make so much as a peep over the last few months as someone used a bot to fill the FCC comment system with bogus support for the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality. But in a blog post discussing their findings, the group is quick to lambaste the EFF for violating consumer privacy, despite what pretty clearly wound up being some deeply flawed analysis:
"For groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that claim to champion consumers’ online privacy, it would be an unprecedented privacy breach if they knowingly culled other people’s email addresses from spam databases and without their consent falsely submitted comments into the docket,” Flaherty continued. “At this point, the full extent of the problem is unclear, but it definitely deserves further investigation."
And when the EFF made it clear the comments didn't come from its system and the group had no part in filing them, the NPLC had a rather unique interpretation of the EFF's statement:
#EFF Says 100K pro-#netneutrality #FCC public comments are fake.https://t.co/M7uIbGaN97
— NLPC (@NLPC) June 2, 2017
So again, there's two options here: someone supporting net neutrality took the time to try and pad the numbers by cutting and pasting the EFF's form letter into the comment system, using fake names and e-mail addresses. Or, someone opposing net neutrality used the EFF's form letter to try and frame the group for falsely stuffing the ballot box, further eroding trust in the validity of the FCC process. And given the lion's share of legitimate comments support keeping the rules intact, this latter possibility offers some obvious benefits to net neutrality opponents.
Hopefully we'll see some additional, independent and professional analysis of the data down the road. Either way, as with my own experiences above, this could all be prevented by the FCC actually giving a damn and policing abuse of its own comment system. As the EFF quite correctly notes, refusing to do so will only work to discredit the quality of the legitimate comments being made ahead of the final vote to kill the consumer protections later this year.
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Filed Under: comments, fake comments, fcc, net neutrality, open internet
Companies: eff, nlpc
Reader Comments
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"If NLPC had looked closely... they would have noticed the difference... Apparently, they did not."
Edit: "Apparently, they did not give a crap, because it didn't align with their narrative."
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Left Leaning?
I hardly think the EFF is left leaning in any significant way. They certainly value personal liberty in all aspects of modern technology, but putting people's rights above corporate and government policy is hardly the reserve of the left.
As an aside, this administration's mastery of blackwhite is incredible. I have to spend an absurd amount of time explaining to my elderly relatives that what the current FCC is saying is the exact opposite of the truth without actually saying they are lying, because if I call them liars then my relatives stop paying attention. They somehow became convinced that Net Neutrality is the same thing as the Fairness Doctrine and it's a plot to put liberal lies on their Fox News.
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Vickery authored the bot and submitted the fraud himself
Sad.
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Re: Left Leaning?
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Misdirection?
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Quote by Peter Flaherty declaring he has no business writing about such things then.
Also:
"We did not assert that EFF sent the messages or that they came through its website. As quoted above, we stated that the comments “used language from an Electronic Frontier Foundation letter desk campaign,” which Gillula has acknowledged is true"
Also incorrect, looking at the report itself, it is titled:
Analysis of 100,148 comments submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and specifically talks about how these comments were submitted through www.dearfcc.org.
Just wow....
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Re: Left Leaning?
If you want some left leaning group operating on about the same area, ACLU, is the thing. They are more populistic and clearly try to appeal more to their base than to the politicians. That something they encourage has also become part of the statistics some right wing PACs use to disqualify politicians on probably tells more about the extremism and irrationality in modern politics than anything else...
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Caught out...
While there was a lot of discussion about "bot" comments against Net Neutrality, 100,000 supporting bot comments seem to have gotten almost no coverage, especially not around here. Plenty of coverage of the other comments though.
I think the EFF is embarrassed to have any connection to it at all.
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Re:
And one too-clever thing the NLPC did was to state that More than 465,322 pro-net neutrality comments (close to one quarter of all comments submitted) come from email addresses that have submitted comments multiple times. In some cases, thousands of times.
See what they did there? Or rather what they didn't do? They didn't say how many or what proportion of all comments were faked anti-net-neutrality comments. I've read figures that more than 95% of the anti-net-neutrality comments were fake.
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You're mistaken
You're mistaking a "Dialog" with "Monologue" - you are expecting Adjit Pei to have a conversation or "dialog" about ripping out Net Neutrality. This is not his (nor the PACs that throw tons of money in to elected representatives coffers) interest.
This isn't a conversation the FCC is going to have. What we get is a monologue. The outcome is pre-ordained. All hail the new King.
Did you hear me? I said ALL HAIL!
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Interesting..
THEN with all the resources available THAT the gov. says it HAS and CAN USE to track stuff on the net...
Should be easy..
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FCC Itself?
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"a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
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Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
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Re: Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
Too bad for him, he can't resist the same telltale writing style that makes him look like a tool without half a brain cell to rub together...
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Think Tank
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Re: Re: Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
out_of_the_blue's not only using the same garbage shtick as My_Name_Here/Whatever/Just Sayin'/horse with no name/The Anti-Mike, but doing it far more shittily. Like admitting he uses a TOR IP address, which only pirates would do.
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meh those commie libtards are problably to blame no matter what
pick up that can and get used to it
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Re: Left Leaning?
As the saying goes, reality has a left leaning bias.
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Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
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100k comments?
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Re: Re:
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Re: Interesting..
They won't because:
It discredits an organization that the current administration doesn't like.
Remember, they never had any intention of listening to consumers over this. The only reason the comment period was held was because they are required to by law. (A law that I'm sure they want to be rid of, and that this incident will be used as evidence of abuse during the deliberations over it's repeal.)
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Re:
The current iterations are cartoonish, to say the least.
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Re: Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
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Re: "a post supporting the death of net neutrality made in my name, falsely claiming"
Every nation Eats the paint chips it Deserves!
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Re: Left Leaning?
It's not the reserve of the left or the right at this point.
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Re: Left Leaning?
How about the time someone used the DMCA to take down a news report about a ring of corrupt journalists, investors, and developers in the games industry who may have rigged Indiecade and the Independent Games Festival so the games they invested in would win, and Reddit banned anyone who tried to talk about it? They were all Obama campaign operatives so the EFF helped dox anyone who opposed the DMCA takedown.
When Wired collected a team of fanatics to advocate for internet censorship, the EFF endorsed them, probably because the EFF director was one of the six invitees.
The EFF gets publicity by taking a stand on one issue every so often, but they no longer work for the people or for a free Internet.
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Re: Caught out...
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Funny Story. My Right Wing Legislator Barry Loudermilk, sent me an e-mail containing that exact phrase.
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Hearts online
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