We've been noting for some time how something is very rotten at the core of the broadband industry and FCC boss Ajit Pai's unrelenting quest to kill net neutrality. For much of the year, some individual or group has been flooding the agency's website with bogus support for its unpopular plan. The culprit appears to have used a bot and a hacked database to flood the agency's proceeding alphabetically with bogus support for the plan. But when reporters tracked down these individuals, many said they had never commented or had no idea what net neutrality even was.
Other news outlets discovered something even more bizarre -- many of these individuals
appear to be no longer living:
quote:
As the war over the fate of America's free and open internet lumbers on, it appears that opponents of net neutrality will do anything in their power to turn control of the internet over to massive telecom companies -- including committing fraud. As detailed in a letter sent to the FCC Thursday morning, people are pissed that their personal information was used without their knowledge to post anti-net neutrality comments to the FCC's website, which includes at least two people who are recently deceased.
Others still have since dug through many of these comments and found the same thing. Like James Harvey, who took it upon himself to actually track down many of the folks that purportedly threw their support behind the axing of net neutrality found. Harvey again found, as
documented in a post over at Medium, that many of these supporters of the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality either had never commented, had no idea what net neutrality even was, or were....no longer alive.
For example, John Skalski of Sharpsburg, Georgia, posted a comment back in May of this year insisting that net neutrality rules should be appealed:
But Harvey visited Skalski's address and was told by residents there that he had been deceased for some time:
quote:
However, if you go to his house on 11 Tee Pee Row, you will unfortunately speak to a kind person who will tell you that John has been passed away since 2016 and no one else there has the same name. Unfortunately, that is a fake public comment. I found Mr. Skalski’s obituary later.
As we've previously noted, Trump's FCC has shown
absolutely zero interest in doing anything about these fraudulent comments, something the agency is already
facing a lawsuit over. Why? If you raise questions about the legitimacy of the public's only chance to have public input on the FCC's plan, it's easier to downplay the massive, genuine (and living) public opposition to it. Alongside the FCC's
apparently bogus DDoS attack, the rise of the undead is going to make for some interesting fodder in the inevitable lawsuits that will be filed against the agency after it votes to kill the rules later this year.