"Restoring Internet Freedom"

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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Elvis » Mon Dec 18, 2017 9:55 pm

seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 18, 2017 2:36 pm wrote:Senator Chuck Schumer says there will be a Senate Vote to overturn the FCC's ruling on NetNeutrality -- Only a simple majority will be required to overturn the ruling.


:yay :yay :yay :yay :yay


U.S. Senate comes in handy now and then. Hope they vote correct.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Burnt Hill » Mon Dec 18, 2017 10:39 pm

Karmamatterz wrote:About oxygen tanks...People could learn how to purify the outside air and just do it themselves. Might cost them a bit to buy some equipment but it is doable. Or, they could just buy it from someone else. Not sure where you're going with that.


This is not at all practical now is it?

Karmamatterz wrote:I could go dip a bucket of water into Lake Erie a few times a week for drinking water and then purify it myself, super simple. Or, I can buy water from the county or bottles off the shelf. Option


Lake Erie is not without issues, but you are blessed to be near such a great lake. Not everyone has access to fresh water like that.

Karmamatterz wrote:Not a fan of price gouging during a crisis, it's a pretty shitty thing to do. I would expect that if a water distributor (bottled) jacked prices way up then the public backlash would be severe enough that the company would lose business big time from the negative feedback.


And what about predatory sellers, they are only on it for the profit, then they are gone.

Yours is bit of an extreme pov and has much value in a different context.

This situation is more like your price gouging water bottle scenario, and hopefully you are right the public backlash and effects thereof.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby 82_28 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 4:23 am

I don't know why I thought of you Karmamatterz when I read this just now at railroad.net, as I was using the Internet (searched for "railroad forums") to get a bit of a play by play as information began to trickle in early this morning about the Amtrak 501 disaster south of me here. I was using the Internet in its freest and purest form (the way we used to with newsgroups) and learned a lot of expert/shop talk terminology and speculation from workers/enthusiasts. I also saw some comments begin blaming it on antifa right away only to be immediately deleted (another thing the Internet can do). Anyhow, I read this and the italicized part is what made me think of you -- this thread. I don't know if whether in support of you or just that Amtrak train travel is so much less complex than a world of international airline travel (psst look at Hartsfield in Atlanta -- completely crippled -- old landlines still worked of course and almost always will in a power outage). So, onto why I thought of your arguments. Here's the comment from someone there:

For what it's worth, I was aboard train 500 this morning, scheduled to be train #2 headed onto the bypass (northbound from Portland to Seattle), and on train 517 shortly afterwards Seattle-Portland.

We held at Olympia/Lacey (a.k.a. "Centennial") as the BNSF dispatcher of course had more important issues to worry about than keeping us on time; later there was discussion that the Fire Chief didn't want us to proceed due to men/equipment near the tracks. We were eventually given the OK to proceed at restricted speed through Nisqually (the junction point with the Seattle Sub and the Lakewood Sub), although that was 1.1 miles from the incident site, and the only "men or equipment" was a trespasser walking his dog on the Lakewood Sub. We continued on the Seattle Sub (the "old" route/BNSF mainline along Puget Sound) to Tacoma; where I then turned around rather than risking missing my return trip from Seattle.

The old depot was quickly reopened, however the station agents did not have any computers set up and was working via telephone. I walked over to the new station and although there appeared to be people inside, all the doors were locked. I did check out the new platform but otherwise just waited. Meanwhile, a southbound Cascades train (503) and the Coast Starlight (11) both made their station stop at the old depot. The Starlight had two Horizon coaches deadheading inbetween the engines and the baggage car; I suspected that Amtrak was going to use that equipment to substitute for trains 511 and 508 between Portland and Eugene, but upon my return to Portland those cars weren't there so they probably continued all the way to L.A. Train 517 came and we left Tacoma just slightly off schedule.

At Union Station, a WSDOT employee was out handing out "swag" - a lanyard/badge, magnet, keychains, so on...when I returned to Union Station, American Red Cross volunteers were there to assist families awaiting their loved ones.

And as I type this...I just got word literally two minutes ago that a well known railfan and transit supporter and his friend were killed aboard train 501.


http://railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=166546

Anyway. I thought of this thread, imagining what indeed would we do without the Internet? One could say shit works just fine without the Internet as long as it does not have all of this built in complexity, but once it is built in, what is one to do? At the scale of a fairly sparse train line that goes between Washington and Oregon probably pretty easy. At the busiest airport in the world? Falling back on the old phones would just fuck shit up even worse. It's like a "crash kit" in the the restaurant/retail industry. Goddamn, does it suck when the networks/Internet go down. Sure, you got all the old equipment in the attic, but boy is it hard to adapt.

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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Karmamatterz » Tue Dec 19, 2017 10:33 am

Anyway. I thought of this thread, imagining what indeed would we do without the Internet? One could say shit works just fine without the Internet as long as it does not have all of this built in complexity, but once it is built in, what is one to do? At the scale of a fairly sparse train line that goes between Washington and Oregon probably pretty easy. At the busiest airport in the world? Falling back on the old phones would just fuck shit up even worse. It's like a "crash kit" in the the restaurant/retail industry. Goddamn, does it suck when the networks/Internet go down. Sure, you got all the old equipment in the attic, but boy is it hard to adapt.


Good points. I thought of this too when I heard about the tragic accident. Wondering about the logistics for so many people who were stranded, injured and how everybody would re-route, get help etc...

My job relies entirely on the Internet. If it went down I would have to go back to an old school role with the company, or seek employment elsewhere. It's a bit scary to think what would happen to millions of people who rely on modern tech and what they would do without it. Most people would survive, but with major inconveniences.

The Internet is incredibly complex. Most people have no idea how systems are integrated and the enormous amount of work and time that has gone into connecting platforms, servers etc...
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 14, 2018 2:28 pm

The Senate vote to save Net Neutrality and protect a free & open Internet will be held Wednesday, May 16.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed May 16, 2018 6:01 pm

BREAKING: The Senate just voted to reverse AjitPaiFCC's reckless NetNeutrality decision.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 17, 2018 8:12 am

NEWS & POLITICS
The U.S. Senate Just Voted to Save Net Neutrality—Mainstream Media Was Too Trump-Obsessed to Care

This is a really big deal, but you wouldn't know it from the reporting.

By Dina Radke / Media Matters May 16, 2018, 1:27 PM GMT

Today, senators voted on a resolution to undo a 2017 move by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to end net neutrality regulations, but major television and print media outlets have devoted little more than a few mentions to the issue.

This dearth of coverage may stem in part from the distraction of President Donald Trump, as since his election, media outlets have been laser-focused on his statements and actions. Several significant Trump-related stories did break today, but it’s nonetheless obvious that media outlets have done little to address their Trump obsession and prioritize the many other issues that matter to Americans.

Net neutrality requires internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to give their users equal access to all internet content. Upending these rules means that, for a fee, ISPs can prioritize certain websites, allowing them to load more quickly on their users’ devices, and slow down or even block other sites. As Wired’s Klint Finley explained, “Well-established services from deep-pocketed companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft will likely remain widely available. But net-neutrality advocates argue that smaller companies that don’t have the money to pay for fast lanes could suffer. In other words, protecting net neutrality isn't about saving Netflix but about saving the next Netflix.”

Don't let big tech control what news you see. Get more stories like this in your inbox, every day.


The FCC, led by Trump-nominated Ajit Pai, decided last year to end net neutrality rules in a move that voters across the political spectrum largely opposed. Leading up to the FCC’s vote, though, many media outlets were shockingly silent on the repercussions of upending consumer protections on internet access.

As Democratic senators made a last-ditch effort to salvage net neutrality rules -- which passed in the Senate -- coverage by many media outlets is still nowhere to be found.

Today on national cable news, MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle and Fox Business’ FBN AM mentioned the net neutrality vote in brief headline segments. Fox News aired two segments on The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino and Shepard Smith Reporting, and CNN has not mentioned the vote at all.

Fox Business and One American News Network, a decidedly pro-Trump outlet known for pushing conspiracy theories, aired full reports of the net neutrality vote. Both of the reports recited Chairman Pai’s debunked talking point that the deregulation will encourage investment in broadband infrastructure and disparaged Democrats for insisting upon the vote at all.

Additionally, a Nexis search for “net neutrality” produced zero results among the nation’s top newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, and USA Today
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... p-obsessed
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Thu May 17, 2018 10:59 am

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT- ... ent-141844

Last week, AT&T apologized for for its "serious misjudgment" in hiring US President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen to provide “insights” into how the new administration would handle issues like net neutrality and AT&T’s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable. Ultimately, the $600,000 AT&T paid Cohen for said insights became such a scandal, the company was forced to fire its top policy and lobbying man Bob Quinn, despite the fact that such behavior is arguably routine at the Dallas-based telecom giant.

While AT&T would obviously like to move on from the scandal, watchdogs and several lawmakers would like to see the issue explored in more detail.
New scheduling documents obtained through FOIA by corruption watchdog American Oversight show the Chairman met with with top AT&T executives at a private dinner in Barcelona a month after the company began paying Cohen.

“A private dinner between Chairman Pai and an AT&T executive who hired Michael Cohen to influence the president doesn’t reflect well on the impartiality of the FCC," said American Oversight Director Austin Evers in a statement. "Pai should disclose exactly what was discussed at the dinner and who organized the meeting. Did Michael Cohen set up a dinner where AT&T executives tried to sway a member of the president’s administration on policy that affects the company?"

"We can’t know for sure until Pai tells the whole story," the group proclaimed. "The FCC has some serious explaining to do."

Given that Pai is arguably ultra-cozy with the industry he's supposed to be holding accountable, it's entirely possible that meeting would have happened anyway. But the group still believes that the company and Ajit Pai should be more transparent about the meeting, especially given the laundry list of favors (from gutting net neutrality to killing consumer privacy protections) that have rained down upon AT&T since Trump picked Pai to head the agency.

Meanwhile, the scuttlebutt I'm hearing in telecom circles is that AT&T's donations came as AT&T was trying to secure the nomination of Pai's fellow FCC commissioner Brendan Carr; the telco eager to ensure the appointment of a Commissioner that wouldn't wander off script and would consistently support Pai's industry-cozy agenda.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Elvis » Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:13 pm

THE FAILURE OF INTERNET FREEDOM

BY JACK GOLDSMITH

https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/defaul ... dsmith.pdf


A tech-savvy friend sent me this interesting report, ultimately from a Hoover perspective but definitely containing some good background and things to think about. I definitely have some thoughts about it, but right now I should be working...on the Internet, of course!
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 06, 2018 7:32 pm

So an FCC IG report will soon be released confirming the FCC made up a DDOS attack during the #netneutrality repeal.

Ajit Pai's trying to get out ahead of that report by throwing the former CIO under the bus and playing dumb.


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E-mail evidence obtained via FIOA shows the CIO did make up the DDOS attack. But there's also e-mail evidence showing Pai's FCC then played up the fake claim to the tech press for PR effect:

FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims

Dell Cameron6/05/18 10:30am

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testifies on Capitol Hill, April 26, 2018
Photo: Getty
As it wrestled with accusations about a fake cyberattack last spring, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) purposely misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency’s official story.

Internal emails reviewed by Gizmodo lay bare the agency’s efforts to counter rife speculation that senior officials manufactured a cyberattack, allegedly to explain away technical problems plaguing the FCC’s comment system amid its high-profile collection of public comments on a controversial and since-passed proposal to overturn federal net neutrality rules.

The FCC has been unwilling or unable to produce any evidence an attack occurred—not to the reporters who’ve requested and even sued over it, and not to U.S. lawmakers who’ve demanded to see it. Instead, the agency conducted a quiet campaign to bolster its cyberattack story with the aid of friendly and easily duped reporters, chiefly by spreading word of an earlier cyberattack that its own security staff say never happened.

The FCC’s system was overwhelmed on the night of May 7, 2017, after comedian John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, directed his audience to flood the agency with comments supporting net neutrality. In the immediate aftermath, the agency claimed the comment system had been deliberately impaired due to a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Net neutrality supporters, however, accused the agency of fabricating the attack to absolve itself from failing to keep the system online.

The system similarly crashed after Oliver ordered his viewers to the FCC website in 2014. The FCC, at the time led by Democrat Tom Wheeler, determined that the comment system had been affected by a surge of internet traffic. The issue was compounded, sources told Gizmodo, by a weakness in the system’s out-of-date software.

Importantly, the agency never blamed a malicious attack for the system’s downtime in 2014—not in any official statement.

But in May 2017, under the Trump-appointed chairman, Ajit Pai, at least two FCC officials quietly pushed a fallacious account of the 2014 incident, attempting to persuade reporters that the comment system had long been the target of DDoS attacks. “There *was* a DDoS event right after the [John Oliver] video in 2014,” one official told reporters at FedScoop, according to emails reviewed by Gizmodo.

David Bray, who served as the FCC’s chief information officer from 2013 until June 2017, assured reporters in a series of off-the-record exchanges that a DDoS attack had occurred three years earlier. More shocking, however, is that Bray claimed Wheeler, the former FCC chairman, had covered it up.

According to emails from Bray to reporters, Wheeler was concerned that if the FCC publicly admitted there was an attack, it would likely incite “copycats.”

“That’s just flat out false,” said Gigi Sohn, former counselor to Chairman Wheeler. “We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time.”

Bray’s exchanges with reporters, which took place via email, were obtained by American Oversight, a watchdog group, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Gizmodo reviewed the more than 1,300 pages of records last week.

The FCC has not responded to requests for comment.


FCC official alleges that the former chairman, Tom Wheeler, concealed a DDoS attack from the public.
Screenshot: FCC email
In August, Gizmodo revealed that Bray had been the anonymous source behind reports that the FCC had been “hacked” in 2014. Multiple FCC sources—including a security contractor who worked on the comment system at the time—confirmed that no evidence was ever found showing a malicious attack caused the system’s downtime during Oliver’s show.

Article preview thumbnail
Multiple sources said that Bray, the senior official responsible for maintaining the comment system, had alone pushed the cyberattack narrative internally. When he was unable to produce proof, they said, he reached out to a reporter. After requesting anonymity, Bray contradicted the agency’s official story, claiming an attack was responsible. The conflicting accounts led to confusion in the press over whether Oliver’s call to action was actually responsible for the FCC’s technical failures.

“The security team was in agreement that this event was not an attack,” a former FCC security contractor told Gizmodo of the 2014 outage. “The security team produced no report suggesting it was an attack. The security team could not identify any records or evidence to indicate this type of attack occurred as described by Bray.” The contractor’s statements were supported by Sohn and confirmed by two other sources with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named or quoted.

“We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack.”
“I have seen no evidence of a DDoS attack on the FCC comment system,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told Gizmodo. “But I did see millions of Americans write in to the FCC to stop its misguided effort to roll back net neutrality. It’s time for the agency to own up to what really happened.”

Bray is not the only FCC official last year to push dubious accounts to reporters. Mark Wigfield, the FCC’s deputy director of media relations, told Politico: “there were similar DDoS attacks back in 2014 right after the Jon Oliver [sic] episode.” According to emails between Bray and FedScoop, the FCC’s Office of Media Relations likewise fed cooked-up details about an unverified cyberattack to the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal apparently swallowed the FCC’s revised history of the incident, reporting that the agency “also revealed that the 2014 show had been followed by DDoS attacks too,” as if it were a fact that had been concealed for several years. After it was published, the Journal’s article, authored by tech reporter John McKinnon, was forwarded by Bray to reporters at other outlets and portrayed as a factual telling of events. Bray also emailed the story to several private citizens who had contacted the FCC with questions and concerns about the comment system’s issues.

In doing so, the FCC was apparently using the Journal as a way to bolster its own unsubstantiated claims, which the agency’s security staff, and its former leadership, had internally dismissed.

In several emails, the FCC encouraged journalists to compare the 2017 incident to a DDoS attack on the Pokémon Go mobile game a year before. Michael Krigsman, a columnist for ZDNet, took the bait, despite the FCC continuing to withholding any proof an attack occurred. Krigsman wrote, unqualifiedly: “It’s similar to the distributed denial of service attack on Pokemon Go in July 2016.”

(In later exchanges with Bray, Krigsman turned on one of his own colleagues, who had published a story about the FCC’s refusal to release proof there was an attack. In one email, Krigsman encouraged the FCC to demand a correction for the story, while instructing Bray to complain to his colleague’s boss. Amazingly, Krigsman then encouraged the FCC to publicly admonish his own publication.)

Krigsman’s own flattering piece about Bray was, like the Journal’s report, circulated to security reporters and described as a “good article that does get the technical facts correct on what happened.”


ZDNet columnist Michael Krigsman telling the FCC’s David Bray to demand his own publisher issue a correction.
Screenshot: FCC email
Bray’s claim that Wheeler knew that DDoS attacks had occurred, but withheld it from the public “out of concern of copycats,” is an allegation that has never been made publicly. It is also refuted by numerous former and current FCC officials with whom Gizmodo spoke recently and over the past year.

Wheeler declined our request to comment.

Bray’s claim about Wheeler also appears in a draft copy of a blog post written by Bray on Chairman Pai’s behalf. It appears to have never been published online. One line from the draft reads: “This happened in 2014, though at the time we chose not to talk about the automated programs denying service to the commenting system since we didn’t want to invite copycats.”

As with Bray’s claim about a 2014 attack, the FCC has repeatedly failed to present any evidence that its servers—which, unlike in 2014, now reside on a cloud infrastructure—were bombarded by malicious traffic following Oliver’s net neutrality segment last year. However, in response to inquiries from Senators Ron Wyden and Brian Schatz last year, the FCC stated that the disruption was caused by what it called “a non-traditional DDoS attack.” (Bray was also the first official to claim a DDoS attack occurred in May 2017.)

“The security team produced no report suggesting it was an attack.”
The agency said it detected “patterns of disruptions that show abnormal behavior outside the scope of a lobbying surge,” which it said included an “extremely high level of atypical cloud-based traffic” directed toward the comment system’s API interface. “From our analysis of the logs, we believe these automated bot programs appeared to be cloud-based and not associated with IP addresses usually linked to individual human filers,” the agency said.

The FCC has refused to release any documentation showing an investigation into the comment system’s downtime occurred. According to the FCC, the FBI declined to investigate the matter, saying it “did not appear to rise to the level of a major incident that would trigger further FBI involvement.” The FBI declined to confirm or deny any contact with the FCC about the issue.

The fact that an investigation at the FCC would have been carried out by an official who had earlier refused to accept the formal findings of the FCC’s own security professionals, and then anonymously leaked claims contradicting them, only further casts suspicion on the FCC’s story.


Screenshot: FCC email
Last July, the agency refused to release more than 200 pages of documents related to the incident in response to a FOIA request filed by Gizmodo. In a formal letter, the agency claimed that while its IT staff had observed a cyberattack taking place, those observations “did not result in written documentation.” A federal watchdog investigation, which is ongoing, followed in October.

In the more than 1,300 emails released to American Oversight last month, the FCC redacted every internal conversation about the 2017 incident between FCC employees, citing either attorney-client communications or deliberative process privilege. (The FOIA exemption appears to be very liberally applied, as it is typically reserved for discussions in which “governmental decisions and policies are formulated.”)

The agency also redacted every discussion between staff last year regarding how to respond to inquiries about the incident from U.S. senators; all internal discussions about how to respond to members of the press; as well as an internal newsletter from the day after the agency claims it was attacked.

Demonstrating how overeager the agency is to redact emails from public records, its attorneys also redacted a year-old Politico newsletter in full:


Screenshot: FCC emails
In addition to being acquired by American Oversight, the records were produced in a lawsuit brought by BuzzFeed reporter Kevin Collier, who told Gizmodo that he intends to challenge the redactions in court. (Collier is represented pro bono by New York attorney Dan Novack, who also represents Gizmodo in an ongoing case against the FBI.)

“Some of these messages are probably correctly redacted, but avoiding potential embarrassment is not a legitimate reason for the government to conceal an email,” Austin Evers, American Oversight’s executive director, said. “We were skeptical of the FCC’s explanations about its online comment system issues last May, and it’s clear that we still don’t have the full story about what happened.”

Read the full collection of FCC emails below.
https://gizmodo.com/fcc-emails-show-age ... 1826535344
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 18, 2018 6:15 am

New York Attorney General’s Probe Into Fake FCC Comments Deepens

Advocacy groups subpoenaed over comments posted to FCC from people who deny they made them

James V. GrimaldiUpdated Oct. 16, 2018 11:00 p.m. ET

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai speaking earlier this month at a news conference in Washington. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By
James V. Grimaldi
The New York attorney general’s office has subpoenaed more than a dozen advocacy groups, lobbying firms and consultants as part of an investigation of fake comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission over its proposal to scale back its regulation of the internet.

The civil subpoenas are aimed at determining who was behind millions of comments sent using the names of real people who didn’t authorize them, according to a person familiar with the investigation. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a statement that her office found up to 9.5 million comments that appear to have been filed using the names and addresses of real people who had no idea they were being cited in the comments.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal last year found thousands of people who said their names were used without their permission to post comments about FCC rules.

The attorney general’s yearlong investigation is targeting fake comments filed on both sides of the issue. Among the entities subpoenaed are Broadband for America, a group backed by AT&T Inc. and other internet-service providers who sought the repeal of the Obama-era internet rules known as net neutrality, as well as consumer groups that supported the Obama rules, such as Fight for the Future and Free Press.

Broadband America and AT&T didn’t respond to requests for comment. Free Press spokesman Tim Karr said: “We are responding to their requests and welcome this inquiry.” Fight for the Future Executive Director Sarah Roth-Gaudett said, “We welcome this investigation” and said she hopes it uncovers those responsible for the fakes.

Several consulting firms hired by industry and consumer groups also have received subpoenas, according to the person familiar with the investigation and managers of some of the firms. These firms were contractors and subcontractors in the massive lobbying efforts that helped generate more than 20 million comments on the FCC decision to scale back internet regulation.

The New York investigation is one of the first official probes into lobbying firms that promise special interests they can deliver thousands, even millions of people to back their causes under consideration before the government. The sector is sometimes called “AstroTurf lobbying” for generating artificial grass-roots support.

One subpoena went to Century Strategies, a public-relations firm used by Broadband for America. Century, whose chief executive is Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, boasts on its website that its “principals are among the nation’s most effective grass-roots organizers” and that it uses sophisticated digital tools to support its “ground game.”

“Our work was done with the highest standards of integrity and we stand by it,” Mr. Reed said when asked for comment about the New York probe?

A small firm in Mineral, Va., called Media Bridge LLC, also received a subpoena. Media Bridge managing partner Shane Cory said he was looking for relevant material to respond to the subpoena.

Media Bridge used online advertising to collect the names of people who supported FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plans to repeal the Obama-era rules. Mr. Cory, the former executive director of the conservative undercover investigative group Project Veritas, said his work resulted in what he believed to be legitimate comments but that “bad actors” submitting fakes have created difficulties for his firm.

He said part of the blame lies with government agencies that put no limits on how comments are posted, not requiring verification of identity or commonly used tools to hinder bots. Mr. Pai has acknowledged the problem and recently told Congress the FCC was planning to improve its comments system to ward off fakery.

“Unfortunately, with no limits, it is the Wild West out there,” Mr. Cory said. “The corruption of the public process will happen—especially when you have billion-dollar questions at stake.”

Media Bridge worked with LCX Digital, a California online advertising firm that also got a subpoena, according to the person familiar with the investigation. LCX didn’t return a call seeking comment.

The attorney general also subpoenaed the Center for Individual Freedom, an Alexandria, Va.-based group that supported Mr. Pai’s repeal of the rules and drafted one of the most frequently cited comments posted on the FCC website: a complaint about the “unprecedented regulatory power the Obama administration.”

The Journal investigation reached 1,994 of the people registered by the FCC as having filed that comment; 72% of them said the comment was falsely submitted.

The center didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Appeared in the October 17, 2018, print edition as 'New York Probes Fake FCC Comments.'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-a ... ?mod=e2twp
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby chump » Fri Jan 11, 2019 10:33 am


https://juliareda.eu/2019/01/article-13 ... -finished/

Article 13 is almost finished – and it will change the internet as we know it

Negotiations about the EU copyright reform law have resumed: After missing the original Christmas deadline, negotiators for the European Parliament and Council are now aiming to finalise the text on January 21, 2019.

The negotiators have reached agreement on the core of Article 13, which will change the internet as we know it: They want to make internet platforms directly liable for any copyright infringements their users commit.

What remains to be decided: Exactly what lengths will platforms need to go to to avoid or limit their liability? Just how much they will need to restrict our ability to post and share our creations online?

[…]
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 22, 2019 1:15 pm

Yet another top Donald Trump adviser is in trouble
James Sullivan | 12:01 pm EST February 22, 2019

The downfall of Roger Stone is devastating for Donald Trump and much of his White House for good reason – but there is another unlikely character in the mix who may want to tread carefully: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, who became a household name in 2017 after moving to repeal net neutrality protections.

Shortly before the FCC announced it would roll back protections that treat all transmission of data equally, the FCC received a litany of suspicious user comments supporting Pai’s controversial decision, which caused the system to crash. Rather than the usual dissent you would find on an online forum, many of the comments repeated key phrases, and had email addresses that were fraudulent, thought to be obtained through identity theft.

Pai blamed the attack on fans of comedian John Oliver, one of the few media personalities to talk about net neutrality at length, and said that the public comments were not credible. At about the same time, an anonymous robocall campaign targeted seniors – warning that cell phone rates would climb if net neutrality rules were not repealed.



Poring over the data, Dell Cameron at Gizmodo found connections to an anti-net neutrality campaign called Free Our Internet, run by Christie-Lee McNally, who ran Trump’s campaign in Maine, and was promoted by Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi. The New York Attorney General’s office identified more than two million fraudulent comments on the page, and pushed to delay the vote to repeal.

Since then, more than twenty states have joined a lawsuit against the FCC, and The New York Times sued the FCC last fall demanding that they turn over evidence that could indicate interference from Russian trolls during the comment period. If the evidence exists, we could have a cyberattack on our hands, aided and abetted by Pai – and there is yet again a continuing streak of Roger Stone appearing wherever the Kremlin happens to be.
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/a ... ald/16156/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Gnomad » Fri Feb 22, 2019 2:54 pm

Whenever people talk about data caps and what not absurdity...

Got fiber coming to the building´s basement, got a 100 mbit ethernet to my flat, and it costs me ... wait for it... 9,90 euros per month. Yeah. Unlimited, unthrottled, uncapped, pure internet - and I have a choice of at least 3 major ISPs with similar pricing structure. And in these parts (Europe), this is the NORM. Reading about the US internet "offerings" sounds frankly like a 3rd world backwater, which it is. Same thing with cellular internet, its dirt cheap, and unlimited.

What you have over there is simply price gouging and no real competition in large parts of the country, leading to inflated price, and if a community tries to build its own infrastructure, maybe even someone like Verizon suing for unfair socialism ;)
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Re: "Restoring Internet Freedom"

Postby Gnomad » Fri Feb 22, 2019 3:14 pm

On the new EU copyright law chump mentioned above...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201 ... right-law/

From the comments there:


"Quote:The practical implications of Article 13 depend heavily on how they're implemented. If Article 13 becomes law, its vague text will need to be transposed into detailed regulations in every member country. Then those regulations will need to be interpreted by judges."


And so, ironically, this proposal poses exactly the same fundamental problem as Brexit.

It presents voters (in this case, members of the EU parliament) with two choices: (1) a status quo with known issues and downsides and frustrations, (2) a set of very attractive-sounding aspirations whose actual nuts-and-bolts implementation is left as an exercise to the reader. And so it is not hard to vote for the latter! Pitfalls? What pitfalls? The letter of the law isn't even written yet, so a thorough analysis of the downsides can't even begin to be performed.

Inevitably, they will vote for the set of aspirations. They sound so lovely! And then everyone will have to come up with a specific legal implementation which will, SPOILER ALERT, have huge, glaring, disastrous problems. But they already passed the aspiration, so oh well! Gotta go through with it because reasons.

This two-step process is absolutely fucking idiotic.


https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190 ... ters.shtml
... ...

However, as we wrote about back in December, an analysis that looked at the actual lobbying efforts around copyright in the EU found that it was done overwhelmingly by the legacy copyright industries, and only sparingly by the tech companies. In that post, I went through a spreadsheet looking at the lobbying of the EU Commission, and found that over 80% of the meetings were from the entertainment industry.

However, as is coming out now, there was definitely one "tech" company that was one of the most aggressive lobbyists on Article 13. However, it was lobbying in favor of it, and that's because it knew that Article 13 would lead to an artificial, but highly inflated demand for internet filters. And that's the company known for building the filtering technology behind nearly all of the non-ContentID copyright filters: Audible Magic.

Law professor Annemarie Bridy recently posted a detailed Twitter thread of Audible Magic's lobbying activities regarding Article 13. It's easy to see why the company did so, because the law, if put into effect, would be a huge, huge benefit for Audible Magic, more or less forcing nearly every internet platform of a decent size to have to purchase Audible Magic's technology. Indeed, in the run-up to Article 13, we heard directly from policymakers in the EU who would point to Audible Magic as "proof" that filtering technology was readily available for not much money and that it worked. Neither of these claims are accurate.

On the fees, Audible Magic has a public pricing page that has been frequently pointed out by supporters of Article 13, often with the claim "fees start as low as $1,000 per month." But... that's not accurate. The $1,000 only applies to "on device" databases. Hosted databases start at $2,000 per month, which is already double that... and the $2,000 per month only covers very low levels of usage. Indeed, the usage rates are so low that it's unlikely to think that any company that used Audible Magic at that rate would be making very much (if any) money at all -- meaning that relatively speaking, Audible Magic would be a huge margin killer. And the rates quickly go up from there. Indeed, on Audible Magic's pricing page, as soon as you get to a level that one might consider "sustainable" for a business, the prices become "contact us."
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