This week, the Senate is expected to vote on CISA, a controversial cybersecurity bill, without having seen hundreds of faxes from concerned citizens urging them to vote against this legislation. The faxes were sent via the http://ift.tt/1gmRKa6 campaign, which criticized CISA as a mass surveillance bill in disguise. Unfortunately, once received by the Senate’s fax system, the majority of these faxes were lost or deleted, without ever reaching the offices of the senators.
This is not ok. We don't care why or how, but the Senate must hear from their constituents if they are trying to communicate with them. That's their job and they should admit they failed to do so.
Full disclosure: I’m Jeff Lyon, CTO at Fight for the Future and the architect of the faxing system we used to send these faxes. I’ll explain how we built the system, and how, with the help of a couple of friendly senators, we proved that the faxes were lost from the Senate’s system.
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We built a server capable of blanketing the Senate with faxes (pic) Powered by 12 US Robotics faxmodems, 12 dedicated phone lines, and running out of my attic, this allowed us to send 20,000 faxes every day to the U.S. Senate
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Over 6 million faxes were generated by concerned citizens on http://ift.tt/1gmRKa6 We didn’t expect such a mind blowing number, but we were sending them as fast as we could. We delivered over 400,000 of these faxes in August, and the system appeared to be working beautifully.
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In September, we heard from Senator Ron Wyden’s office that they weren’t receiving our faxes. We took the fax system offline to do some testing. Wyden’s office confirmed receiving only 743 of the 6,220 faxes we sent to them.
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We reached out to the Office of the Sergeant at Arms (SAA) to get more information about the problem The Sergeant at Arms is responsible for Senate operations, including the telecommunication systems the Senate uses for receiving faxes. We explained the problem via phone and email, in the hopes that they could locate the missing faxes.
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Weeks later, SAA replied that they weren’t getting our faxes and not blocking them (screenshot of email) This is when we knew something had gone very wrong. We know the faxes were sent. I had been monitoring the performance of the faxing system throughout its operation, keeping an eye as the faxes were sent in realtime. It’s kind of hard to ignore the screeching of dialup faxmodems, and modems don’t screech unless there’s another modem on the other end receiving data. I decided to ask my phone company for a detailed statement of our phone call history.
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In early October, I finally received an 860 page phone bill showing all our calls in August (pic | another pic) The phone company initially sent a bill without our full call history, and it took weeks to get them to send me the full record. This showed hundreds of thousands of calls placed from the same 612 area code phone lines that the SAA claimed to have never received. To clarify, 11 out of 12 of our phone lines were 612 area code. These call records would not exist if the Senate fax lines didn’t pick up our calls and receive data.
So why did this happen?
Right now, it doesn’t really matter why this happened. Something went wrong in the Senate’s faxing system, and whether it was a glitch, or something done on purpose to try to stop our faxes from going through, the end result is the same. The Senate was unable to consider timely communications from thousands of constituents, urging them to vote against CISA, a bill they’re debating right now.
And disappointingly, we may never know the truth. Since the Senate is exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, we’ll never be able to look through their records to see what really happened.
If Congress proceeds to a vote on CISA without considering the wishes of their constituents, our democracy has failed. Please help spread the word and call on Congress to acknowledge this problem before it’s too late.
by rubbingalcoholic http://ift.tt/1kngosO
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