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

Logs get deleted or corrupted all of a sudden

>Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side?

There's plenty:

>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.”

You presented the "Chicago programmer" analysis as proof of bot activity. In the linked blog post, they say:

>A number of journalists have tried to trace where this message is coming from, and the best guess seems to be the Council for Individual Freedom. This was a mentioned in a recent Gizmodo article, where the organization claimed that they were running an ad campaign that directed users to a form, and they provided a screenshot of that form.

This is the same thing that many of the pro NN organizations were doing. Under what definition are you implying that a single message submitted 300k times wasn't a bot but the other ones discussed are?

Again:

>He said the FCC received more than 7.5 million comments consisting of the same short-form letter supporting the current rules from about 45,000 unique email addresses, “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website.”

This is on average each email being used over 100 times. You think 7 million Americans:

A. Know how to use email generator websites B. Decided to all use a particular website C. Sent the same form letter while using said website and D. Happened to choose the same name as 100 other people on average?

This is just not a credible claim.

I'm sure you've got a perfectly innocent non-bot explanation for this as well:

>He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”

Exactly; I was on that list and looked at the db during the intial controversy. I looked up some of my neighbours, and it was clear to me they had no obvious connection to the issue, and had in fact very similar or exact things to say, as I recall. I took it at the time to mean they had gave someone a proxy to speak for them, maybe some business or political group.

> 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.”

This is consistent with my claim: "the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of actual human people to send in pre-written messages they agree with but did not author."

There is not enough detail in the WSJ article to distinguish between scenario 1, Ms. Burney having clicked on a thing that says "take action now to support net neutrality!" which sent a message under her name that she didn't write and no longer remembers, and scenario 2, Ms. Burney not having been involved at all, not wanting to have submitted a comment, but happening to agree with a message she never submitted. Both are plausible under the evidence, and we know there were sites that let people submit pre-written letters to the FCC and asked only for some contact info. I am claiming that scenario 1 is plausible and nothing in the article contradicts it.

What we know about Ms. Burney is that, first, she's familiar enough with the rules to have an opinion, and second, she "never wrote that." That's exactly what we'd expect from someone who sent in a pre-written comment.

If you want to argue that comments in scenario 1 count as "fake" comments for some reason, sure, we can discuss that, but first let's settle the claim you made, that these were "bot campaigns." Only in scenario 2 could it have been a "bot campaign."

> Under what definition are you implying that a single message submitted 300k times wasn't a bot but the other ones discussed are?

The definition that 300K real human people clicked a form and provided (or at least were directed to provide, and usually did provide) their own contact information, signing a pre-written message that they agreed with but did not author.

> You think 7 million Americans: A. Know how to use email generator websites B. Decided to all use a particular website C. Sent the same form letter while using said website and D. Happened to choose the same name as 100 other people on average?

Yes.

From the evidence we have, we know there were massive organized campaigns to get large numbers of Americans to submit, of their own agency, pre-written letters from the FCC. So it's not merely that it's theoretically possible, we have strong evidence for B and C, at least.

I'd have to dig up the report to see what happened, but a plausible scenario here for A is that one of these campaigns said something like "Your e-mail address will be public record, you may want to generate a throwaway address," and either it linked to this "fake e-mail generator website" or it was first on Google. In turn, for D, it's also entirely plausible that that website uses a low-entropy random email generator, such that it couldn't generate more than 45,000 email addresses and therefore had collisions.

What's your scenario? That a bot generated all these emails and used a third-party e-mail address generator website (instead of, say, generating its own emails)? Did the third-party e-mail address generator website have an API, or did the bot scrape it 45,000 times, decide that that was enough addresses, and then submit seven million comments?

> He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”

E-mail address? IP address? Mailing address?

In particular, is your claim that a Russian bot campaign sent a bunch of letters to the FCC identifying itself as from Russia, knowing full well that the FCC takes into account only comments from America? How does that make any sense? I don't have an explanation, but I don't think you do, either, and you don't have enough evidence to call it a "bot campaign."

Assuming you trust the WSJ to have conducted the survey in an honest and non-leading manner, but I thought we weren't supposed to be trusting "biased media." The article starts off by portraying net neutrality as "pro-regulation" - I'd imagine a good number of people who are pro-net-neutrality would not have answered yes to, say, "Did you send a letter to the FCC favoring additional regulation on the internet?" despite having done so. We'd need to see exactly what the survey said and how they worded it.

They also haven't given you enough information to know the size of the pro-NN batch they investigated, so we still don't know that it's "massive."