The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just issued a press release claiming, “Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS).”
The FCC is saying that the site hosting their comment system was attacked at the exact same time comments would have started flooding in from John Oliver’s viral Last Week Tonight segment about net neutrality. The media widely reported that the surge in comments crashed the FCC’s site.
Disclosure: I am a a net neutrality activist and I work for Fight for the Future one of the groups behind BattleForTheNet.com. I have been paying close attention to the issue since 2014, and have been part of efforts that overwhelmed the FCC’s comment site in the past.
The FCC’s statement today raises two concerns for me. It strikes me that either:
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The FCC is being intentionally misleading, and trying to claim that the surge in traffic from large numbers of people attempting to access their site through John Oliver’s GoFCCYourself.com redirect amounts to a “DDoS” attack, to let themselves off the hook for essentially silencing large numbers of people by not having a properly functioning site to receive comments from the public about an important issue, or—worst case—is preparing a bogus legal argument that somehow John Oliver’s show itself was the DDoS attack.
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Someone actually did DDoS the FCC’s site at the exact same time as John Oliver’s segment, in order to actively prevent people from being able to comment in support of keeping the Title II net neutrality rules many of us fought for in 2015.
Given the current FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s open hostility toward net neutrality, and the telecom industry’s long history of astroturfing and paying shady organizations to influence the FCC, either of these scenarios should be concerning for anyone who cares about government transparency, free speech, and the future of the Internet.
One thing that we can do right now is call for the FCC to release its logs to independent security analysts so that we know what actually happened. The public has a right to know. You can email the FCC’s Chief Information Officer asking for them to do this at David.Bray@fcc.gov or call 202-418-2020
by evanFFTF http://ift.tt/2powMvt
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