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Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

ag.ny.gov

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Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#251

Post by nerdponx »

p-e-w wrote: post #100

Not being very familiar with US government webdesign, it took a while for me to realize that this is in fact the official website of the NY attorney general, rather than the personal website of an individual. The AG's name is written in huge letters on top, as if it was her, rather than her office, that mattered most. The name appears three times before the first paragraph of the article, and again in large, bold let…

To be fair, this is atypical among US government websites. NY leadership in particular seems to tend towards egotism. Lest we forget that governor Cuomo spent millions of taxpayers dollars on new highway signs to rename a bridge after his father, who by many accounts would have abhorred the idea of having a bridge named after him.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#252

Post by williamcotton »

throw101010 wrote: post #223
nine_k wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why, I think, the future is either putting your money (or at least provable identity) where your mouth is, or not being heard (e.g. because everyone will assume a petition without hard proofs of identity fake). Yes, this is disenfranchising. But not being heard while some company pretends to speak for you is even more disenfranchising.

Maybe this will come off as cynical, but aren't the customers of these 3 companies doing what you suggest here? "Putting their money where their mouth is", and since they have a lot of money their voice gets heard over the ones of individuals with no money. I don't think it's your goal. So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly…

Anonymity, in the age of cryptography, is not going anywhere.

Between astroturfing, AIs, trolls, and foreign involvement, we are increasingly in need of a countering force. We are currently suffering under the tyranny of the anonymous!

It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies! The arguments of the 1990s do not make sense given the realities of the 2020s.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#253

Post by mauvehaus »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #243
DougN7 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine your “trusted third party” is or becomes a dictator, who logs all signed keys. This doesn’t solve anything I’m afraid.

Stop trying to solve everything. These complex issues are never solved but we can improve and work on them.

There's value to considering possible points of failure up front.

Think of the inertia that mag stripe only payment cards have in the USA, and think about how long it's taken to get chip cards rolled out. And then consider that we don't have the more secure chip and pin variant that Europe has, and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have any plans to go that route in the future.

A bad solution with broad penetration and huge network effects is one that can't easily be changed in the future. Let's do imagine some worst case scenarios and think about what it would involve to harden a system against them before rolling it out to everyone.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#254

Post by clnq »

savant_penguin wrote: post #236
clnq wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing totalitarian authoritarianism, not communism. This is why I felt that the distinction between communism and the failed USSR experiment was necessary. Sadly, whenever many people from the US hear the word communism, they immediately assume it means the Soviet Union. Communism was one of many aspects of USSR, many of which were much less desirable by its people.

Could you provide one example of communism that did not end up an authoritarian regime? Communism is just not compatible with freedom. When free to choose, societies do not become communist, they embrace production and trade. You cannot achieve what communists want without extensive use of force

It has not been implemented on a state level without the state also being totalitarian. There have been few tries to do it on a state level, anyways.

However, on a town or district level:

1. Primitive Communism — basically all human history before the agricultural revolution.

2. The Paris Commune — Paris was run by its workers for a few months before bloody suppression by capitalists.

3. The Israeli Kibbutz movement.

4. The Zapatistas in Mexico.

5. The Rojava region in Syria.

Overall, there are many cases in which communism has been successful and sustainable for a long time at a district scale. In case of primitive communism, for thousands of years.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#255

Post by mauvehaus »

nine_k wrote: post #247
withinboredom wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why, I think, the future is either putting your money (or at least provable identity) where your mouth is, or not being heard Oh, I assume this will be run by companies. What is stopping them from impersonating you? Or impersonating you after you're dead? How can we trust these companies not to sell access to identities? Further, why not sell/rent your access to your own identity?

It's a good technical question. Partly it's audit: check some randomly chosen votes, look for anyone not remembering casting their vote. Partly it could be cryptography: you keep a private key and sign your vote with it. Your public key is stored by a trusted centralized institution, or several (see GitHub and signed commits), so anyone can verify your vote, but nobody can fake it.

Voting is anonymous to make it harder for someone to demand proof that you voted in accordance with their wishes.

I wouldn't want my employer, for instance, to be able to verify that I voted for their preferred candidate for state representative and take retaliatory actions against me if I didn't.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#256

Post by skizm »

Jupe wrote: post #98

> LCX and Lead ID were responsible for many of these fake comments, letters, and petition signatures. Across four advocacy campaigns in 2017 and 2018, LCX fabricated consumer responses used in approximately 900,000 public comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Similarly, in advocacy campaigns between 2017…

They hire ad / "lead" companies to collect emails of people who have clicked on an ad, or entered their email saying they support A, B, or C and give them permission to post a comment on their behalf. So in theory each comment has someone who gave the company permission to post a comment for them. BUT if you tell an ad company "hey here is $2 million, get us X number of emails" they're going to produce X emails even if there are not X amount of people. The actual fake profiles come from "publisher" websites that generate fake clicks or leads. Usually the ad or lead companies will have some sort of system to detect fake / spam responses... but $2 million is a decent incentive to maybe loosen their standards a bit.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#257

Post by [deleted] »

nine_k wrote: post #230
kevingadd wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think lobbyists and large corporations can't afford the fee to speak?

It's mostly not the fee to speak, even though a mere $1 per vote could be too expensive for some petition-spamming efforts: 100k payments from the same account would trigger suspicion, and creating 100k legal payment accounts (paypal, google / apple / samsung pay, venmo, etc) just to pay $1 per vote may be onerous. I mostly say about giving a ton of identifying info so that your vote can be reliably tracked back to y…

[deleted]

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#258

Post by [deleted] »

RajT88 wrote: post #110

I remember debating with a guy I know about Net Neutrality leading up to this. He was a sales director at a company that ran network backbone and fiber lines. He was insistent that the Net Neutrality debate was dumb, because it was trying to negate the peering agreements that make the industry run. The way he told it, anyone with a big backbone chooses to invest in peering arrangements with other companies who also m…

[deleted]

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#259

Post by nine_k »

mauvehaus wrote: post #255
nine_k wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good technical question. Partly it's audit: check some randomly chosen votes, look for anyone not remembering casting their vote. Partly it could be cryptography: you keep a private key and sign your vote with it. Your public key is stored by a trusted centralized institution, or several (see GitHub and signed commits), so anyone can verify your vote, but nobody can fake it.

Voting is anonymous to make it harder for someone to demand proof that you voted in accordance with their wishes. I wouldn't want my employer, for instance, to be able to verify that I voted for their preferred candidate for state representative and take retaliatory actions against me if I didn't.

I don't speak of general voting, like for President.

I mean voting for various petitions, etc, the stuff outlined in the article.

Better fraud protection during general elections would be great, too, but it's a different and more complex area.

Re: Three Companies Impersonated Millions to Influence Internet Policy

#260

Post by DannyBee »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #112
jonathankoren wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the executives

If my dog bites somebody, I'm on the hook. It should be no different with companies--otherwise there's no incentive to avoid funding shady behavior. Stock ownership is rewarding because it's risky. Let it be risky.

We deliberately changed this with the advent of the LLC, which is a new thing (~50 years) Before that shareholders were liable for corporate acts. At least monetarily

People seem to not realize this.

We should undo it. It was a mistake

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