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The Federal Communications Commission and its sort-of-sleazy chairman Ajit Pai havevbeen forced to admit they were lying when they said the FCC was cyberattacked last year. The FCC's comment system, which is on old and decrepit machinery and software, did in fact fail last fall, but not because it was hacked. It failed because millions of people were attempting to register their support for net neutrality. Not only did Pai lie about the attack, but he lied about the support for net neutrality, and used those excuses to overturn the open internet rule the FCC had passed in 2015. The big problem Pai has now is the lying to Congress part of this story.
Pai will appear before a Senate oversight committee next Thursday, and he's going to have some explaining to do for Democratic members. They want to know about David Bray, Tony Summerlin, and Leo Wong, senior officials at the FCC, and the false information they gave to members of Congress about the supposed hacks. That's a federal crime that can bring five years in prison if the three knowingly lied. They'll also want to know about Pai's role in all of this.
The inspector general's report on the falsified hack says that in January of this year, its investigators became concerned that the officials had lied to Congress. We know they did, the question is whether they did so knowingly and whether Pai knowingly sent them out with that disinformation.
It's awfully hard to believe that Pai and his staff weren't totally just making up shit on purpose when they said all those pro-net neutrality comments coming in were a denial of service attack, but maybe they have such a warped worldview they leapt to that conclusion (against all available evidence) and ran with it, assuming it must be true. Nonetheless, what they told multiple members of Congress was not true, and those members are not happy.
"What we don't know, and what the FCC needs to clear up, is when they knew that they were lying to Congress and the public about it," said Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, from the House oversight committee. "The American people and Congress were lied to for over a year by the FCC, all the way through the public comment process leading to the elimination of the net neutrality rules," said Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "The investigation into this matter is not over," says Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who has had an ongoing correspondence with Pai about the May 2017 incident, including his false statements. "You cannot lie to the Congress and the American people for more than a year, point fingers when your lie is revealed, and expect to get away with it scot-free." All of them vow to follow up.
"If Chairman Pai was advised by FCC general counsel or the FCC inspector general not to notify Congress when he learned no attack took place, we need to see those decisions in writing, along with all internal records related to their made-up cyber-attack," says Dingell.
At the moment, Pai is blaming it all on then-FCC CIO David Bray, issuing a statement saying he is "deeply disappointed" that Bray provided "inaccurate information" about an alleged cyberattack and by the way, it is all President Obama's fault because Bray "was hired by the prior Administration." Sure. The big boss at the agency had nothing to do with any official statements.
This is just more fodder for this summer of action on net neutrality, starting today. You can use this tool to call your representative and tell them to restore net neutrality.
