FCC Chairman and Russian tool, Ajit Pai
I thought I'd been following the FCC's abandonment of the most basic principle of the internet, net neutrality, fairly closely, but I somehow missed that the FCC based its decision to overturn on half a million comments that came from Russian email addresses.
Yikes!
And now the New York Times is pressing the FCC to stop hiding the details of how that went down. It’s filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York:
The New York Times has sued the Federal Communications Commission over the agency's refusal to release records that the Times believes might shed light on Russian interference in the net neutrality repeal proceeding.
The Times made a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request in June 2017 for FCC server logs related to the system for accepting public comments on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules. The FCC refused to provide the records, telling the Times that doing so would jeopardize the privacy of commenters and the effectiveness of the agency's IT security practices and that fulfilling the records request would be overly burdensome.
This led to a months-long process in which the Times repeatedly narrowed its public records request in order to overcome the FCC's various objections. But the FCC still refuses to release any of the records requested by the Times, so the newspaper sued the commission yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The suit seeks to uncover exactly what the Russians did in the FCC public comment process and how the FCC mishandled that process, including its false claims that the public comment system was brought down by a denial-of-service-attack, when in fact it was instead the volume of pro-net-neutrality comments that overwhelmed the system.
From the NYT's lawsuit: (pdf)
The request at issue in this litigation involves records that will shed light on the extent to which Russian nationals and agents of the Russian government have interfered with the agency notice-and-comment process about a topic of extensive public interest: the government's decision to abandon "net neutrality." Release of these records will help broaden the public's understanding of the scope of Russian interference in the American democratic system.
Despite the clear public importance of the requested records, the FCC has thrown up a series of roadblocks, preventing The Times from obtaining the documents.
Repeatedly, The Times has narrowed its request in the hopes of expediting release of the records so it could explore whether the FCC and the American public had been the victim of orchestrated campaign by the Russians to corrupt the notice-and-comment process and undermine an important step in the democratic process of rule-making. Repeatedly, the FCC has responded to The Times's attempt to resolve this matter without litigation with protestations that the agency lacked the technical capacity to respond to the request, the invocation of shifting rationales for rejecting The Times's request, and the misapplication of FoIA's privacy exemption to duck the agency's responsibilities under FoIA.
The FCC sure is struggling mighty hard not to release any information about how they came to make their decision to overturn net neutrality based on comments coming from Russian email addresses. Who do they think they’re kidding, and do they really think they can keep the truth from coming out?