Smut site fingered as source of a million US net neutrality comments
SHMOOCON 2018 A new analysis of the comments made on the United States Federal Communications Commission’s consultation on the future of net neutrality has shown the whole process of public comments was fatally flawed.
Speaking at the ShmooCon hacking conference in Washington DC, Leah Figueroa, lead data engineer at data analytics firm Gravwell, detailed how analysing data from comments showed some massive anomalies. In particular, Figueroa found that over a million messages were sent by commenters who logged smut site P*rnHub as their email provider.
“As of July 2018 P*rnHub had only 55 employees, which means either they sent all out over 18,000 submissions per person or there was something unusual going on,” she said.
Figueroa analysed submissions from over 22 million comments to the FCC and found a lot of odd behavior. Over a thousand came from [email protected] for example, but that address is linked to an Indian GitHub repository.
Oddly, the FCC allowed batch submissions of comments on its net neutrality proposals without verifying email addresses, and Figueroa said plenty of these looked looked inauthentic. Hundreds of thousands of comments were submitted at exactly midnight on four separate days in July – hardly normal behavior.
The majority of these batch submissions were anti-net neutrality, and if you strip them out only about 17 per cent of the comments actually came from likely-to-be-people logging on to the FCC’s website and filing a personal message.
Even after the batch-submitted comments were removed the pattern of comments still looks suspect. Many appeared to have come from bots and the timing of submissions didn’t always sync with the US times you’d expect. Such submissions were also typically in ALL CAPS, rather than conventional text.
After removal of the oddly-sourced-or-worded comments, the vast majority of the comments submitted directly to the FCC’s website supported net neutrality.
However, in the end it didn’t matter that much, because the Republican members of the FCC decided that comments wouldn’t influence their decision. Commissioner Michael O’Rielly argued that the agency didn’t have to take comments into account when it made its decision on strictly party-political lines.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has said he is investigating the comments process on the grounds that some of his constituents may have suffered from identity theft. However, the FCC has backtracked on an earlier promise to cooperate and is now stonewalling any investigation.
American democracy – ain’t it great. ®
Sponsored:
Minds Mastering Machines – Call for papers now open
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/smut_site_fingered_for_fraud_after_a_million_net_neutrality_comments_get_sent/