FCC now says there were no cyber attacks
Millions of comments about net neutrality likely overwhelmed the agency’s servers in May 2017
The partisanship in the battle over net neutrality continues, with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai pointing fingers about a claimed attack on the agency’s servers during the critical public-commenting period before the Republican-controlled FCC repealed federal net neutrality rules.
As online comments to the FCC surged in early May 2017 after HBO talk show host John Oliver urged people to make their voices heard, the agency claimed it was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Tuesday, the Office of the Inspector General released its report after an investigation into the matter, saying it found that there was no such attack.
“As a result of our reviews and the findings articulated above, we determined the FCC, relying on (David) Bray’s explanation of the events, misrepresented facts and provided misleading responses to Congressional inquiries related to this incident,” the inspector general’s office said.
Pai had pre-empted the report Monday: “With respect to the report’s findings, I am deeply disappointed that the FCC’s former Chief Informa-
tion Officer (CIO), who was hired by the prior Administration and is no longer with the Commission, provided inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people,” the FCC chair said in a statement. “This is completely unacceptable.”
That former CIO, David Bray, is now with the San Francisco-based People-Centered Internet. A spokesman for the group said Tuesday that the inspector general has not asked for Bray’s side of the story.
“Dr. Bray has not been contacted by the FCC IG and has not seen their reported findings,” the spokesman said. “There has not been any outreach to ask what he had seen, observed, or concluded during the events more than a year ago in May 2017.”
The report from FCC Inspector General David Hunt showed his office examined emails by Bray during his time with the FCC, but did not seem to indicate that the office spoke with Bray after he left the agency.
Hunt’s office did not return this news organization’s request for comment Tuesday.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the only Democrat left on the agency, released a statement Monday: “The Inspector General Report tells us what we knew all along: the FCC’s claim that it was the victim of a DDoS attack during the net neutrality proceeding is bogus. What happened instead is obvious — millions of Americans overwhelmed our online system because they wanted to tell us how important internet openness is to them and how distressed they were to see the FCC roll back their rights.”
Net neutrality is the principle that all online traffic should be treated equally. The FCC repealed Obama-era net neutrality regulations in December despite polls showing majority public support — among Democrats and Republicans — for the rules. The FCC received millions of public comments before it repealed the rules, but the process was marred by the claims of DDoS attacks and accusations from both sides that some of the comments were fake.
The inspector general’s findings are bound to come up during next Thursday’s hearing by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation regarding FCC oversight.
“Looking forward to the FCC coming to the Senate to answer questions about this disturbing development,” tweeted Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nevada, who’s a member of the committee, Tuesday.