Judge Orders FCC To Hand Over IP Addresses Linked To Net Neutrality Comments

The separate question that still needs to be figured out, is who is going to be penalized for lying to the american people and taking away their freedoms [1]?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/06/fcc-admits-it-was-never-ac...

> The FCC argued in court that making the millions of IP addresses contained in the logs publicly accessible would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” And while [Judge Schofield] didn’t entirely disagree, she said the agency had failed to adequately spell out how anyone would be harmed by the disclosure.

> Regardless, Schofield said she also decided to weigh any hypothetical harm against the potential value of the information to the public. “In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great,” she said, adding: “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed.”

The judge also wrote that:

> ...despite the privacy concerns raised by the agency, releasing the logs may help clarify whether fraudulent activity interfered with the comment period, as well as whether the agency’s decision-making process is “vulnerable to corruption.”

>One 369-word comment supporting the Obama-era net-neutrality rules was posted on the FCC website more than 300,000 times. One of those was attributed to Gloria Burney, 87, a retired speech therapist in Los Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.” A comment from “Elzor The Blarghmaster” at 9632 Elm Road, Maywood, Ill., was among the 818,000 identical FCC comments backing the Trump policy. No such address could be found, said Jimmie Thompson, a U.S. Postal Service carrier in Maywood.

If you've got the impression that the bot compaigns were only from one side, you've just been misled by biased media like OP, which links to prior coverage of one company and doesn't bother to tell you about the broader picture.