This is alleging that CQ impersonated people to file comments with the FCC. I don't know if this meets the legal requirements to be considered some kind of fraud, but it sure seems like it should.
The State of NY and the FBI cannot comment because of ongoing investigations... How about the FBI interviews Ajit Pai, who can't not lie, and they throw him in jail just like Martha Stewart.
What CQ did and what the FCC is help hide is felony impersonation in most states. Each occurrence (sounds like there was at least 8k from the WSJ investigation) could be a felony.
> What exactly are you saying is a lie?
> I'd like you to point to a single lie, since you're asserting that he lied without pointing to any.
You can make as many leaf comments as your karma allows but isn’t going to change anything.
If you look at the linked WSJ article you'll see there were fake comments on many of the common templates, some associated with pro-NN groups and some against.
If you're suggesting that CQ was just the unwitting middleman between the FCC and some other group that was submitting the fraudulent comments through their site, that would have been trivially detectable and filtered out by CQ:
> “Before we submit these comments (via the API) we remove any bad or questionable submissions,” he told Gizmodo. “On a technical level, a few of the things we do include running the email address through an email validator, eliminate duplicate records with the same email address, and remove multiple submissions from the same IP address.”
No, it's focusing on many different comments, including some from pro-NN groups and some from anti-NN groups. 14 groups in total were subpoenaed.
The WSJ article linked (can read it at http://archive.is/sp9Q7) says 4,622 people polled said they hadn't left a particular comment that was pro-NN, which is the majority of the 7,741 total responses that claimed they didn't leave the comment that bears their name.
>If you're suggesting that CQ was just the unwitting middleman between the FCC and some other group that was submitting the fraudulent comments through their site, that would have been trivially detectable and filtered out by CQ:
It's trivial for any teen on 4chan to defeat those measures, come on. Pretty much everything that's out there could in theory have been done by a single 14-year old for laughs. Connect to websites that are collecting names without extensive validation, use a few IPs, etc.
What's more likely - that 14 different groups, some on the pro-NN side and some on the anti-side, all chose to commit crimes by faking names and addresses, or that one bad actor connected to a few of them to troll?
Even that WSJ article focuses largely on that specific blatant example, and notes that the several anti-NN statements they examined were "63%, 72% and 80% bogus comments" (the single pro-NN statement they examined "was 32% bogus.")
Astroturf exists and is a problem on all sides, yes, but this specific instance is far beyond the pale. Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation.
> It's trivial for any teen on 4chan to defeat those measures
That's... debatable. But also beside the point. CQ claims they vetted their submissions for "questionable submissions". If that vetting failed to notice that an identical comment was submitted through them that many times, with names in alphabetical order, then they either are lying about vetting their submissions for accuracy, or they are themselves the ones committing the fraud.
OP is narrowly focused on a particular one out of fourteen companies under investigation for unclear reasons. They don't say whether they've tried similar analysis of any of the other form comments. If I had to make a wild guess, I'd say they expect more clicks here than with a more in depth investigation of everyone involved, for reasons left as an exercise to the reader.
>Astroturf exists and is a problem on all sides, yes, but this specific instance is far beyond the pale. Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation.
14 organizations are under investigation, not just one.
>But also beside the point. CQ claims they vetted their submissions for "questionable submissions".
And also gives a few examples, all of which are trivial to bypass, and all of which are automated, so it's not clear why you'd think they are manually looking at any of these before submitting unless it fails the automated tests.
I did miss that, fair enough -- amend my statement to "Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation of these 14 organizations".
> it's not clear why you'd think they are manually looking at any of these
It's not clear why you'd think 818,000 (per WSJ) identical comments submitted in alphabetical order should pass automated tests?
There's no reason to think they were submitted originally in alphabetical order. The most likely possibility here is that CQ sorted them before submitting to the FCC.
(Also, FWIW I personally witnessed it while trying to submit my own comment on the issue; the viewable posted comments were about 98% duplicates of that one "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet" etc, and the names were somewhere in the E's.)
This wasn't real-time submission, and this should be clear from OP.
Meanwhile CQ is repeatedly insistent that the submissions be recorded individually, and not by the bulk csv method; and when the API limits turn out to be too strict they go to great effort to do it anyway: "We will need to set up multiple servers to feed the API simultaneously to meet the delivery needs of our clients" -- 114 api keys compared to one or two for most other groups.
None of which sits well with your idea that they'd intentionally sort them first. Bulk submissions might be expected to be sorted. The assumption for individually submitted comments is that they're individually submitted; it exposes the astroturfiness very clearly when all the identical comments show up in strict order in the docket. (Or at the very least, if this was just a dumb goofup or excessive tidiness, why wouldn't they have simply explained that as the obvious excuse the moment it started being reported? There'd be plenty of supporting evidence, the stage space alone would have had to have been significant)
1. Ajit Pai started working at the FCC under George W. Bush.
2. Ajit Pai was nominated under Obama for a republican seat at the recommendation of Mitch McConnell: no more than 3 FCC commissioners can be of the same party so the split is generally[0] 3 of the president's party and 2 of the opposition, Ajit Pai was a GOP pick.
3. Ajit Pai was made chairman of the FCC by Donald Trump.
Ajit Pai is a thoroughly Republican operative. Getting rid of Pai would not score any points with the republican party (he's doing exactly what he's supposed to do there), nor would it score any points with the democratic party (way too little, way too late, no chance of the damage done being repaired, and what happened was exactly what'd been predicted when he was made chairman).
[0] when that comes up / is possible: commissioners terms are 5 years (though they may serve up to 6½ if their replacement is not yet appointed) and the seats are staggered so one commissioner's term is up every year
Moreover, Pai has resolutely stood for large companies being insulated from competition and being allowed to extract more money at the expense of the public. That’s Trump’s platform, not an aberration!
> That’s not to say Obama shared Pai’s views—rather, the president was abiding by the convention that the minority party gets to nominate two appointees to the five-seat commission. http://fortune.com/2017/12/14/ajit-pai-net-neutrality-donald...