Just like the election, I wonder if the people behind this care if they get caught as long as they get what they want first. There doesn't seem to be much precedent for overturning laws or elections that were subject to misinformation campaigns.
Only Congress passes laws (statutes). The FCC is a regulatory body. It has statutory authority (delegated by Congress) to create regulations, not statutes (laws). Proposed FCC regulations have to go through a process defined by statute. Publication and comment are part of that process. Irregularities in the process may form the basis of judicial challenge. Whether what is described here constitutes an irregularity is another matter.
Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. If Congress were to a law to explicitly end net neutrality, the courts would have to assume that the law is the will of the people and a challenge could only be made on Constitutional grounds. An FCC regulation can also be challenged on legal grounds (the regulation violates a statute).
> Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent.
Yes, statutory laws must be proven unconstitutional to be struck down, and regulatory laws can be more easily affected by judicial decisions. But for the last 30 years, regulations have been accorded an inappropriate degree of deference by the courts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
If "anti net-neutrality" regulations shall be considered unconstitutional, so shall "pro net-neutrality" ones.
[edit: instead of downvoting me, tell me why left-leaning regulations are automatically Good (and constitutional), and why right-leaning are automatically Evil (and unconstitutional) ?]
I'll take the bait and explain why I'm downvoting you.
The parent posts had literally nothing to do with left vs right. It has to do with accepting the results of misinformation campaigns, and post-factum not taking steps to revert malign legislation.
Even in the case that I give you the benefit of the doubt in that you're taking "pro-net-neutrality" to be in some way left-leaning, the bulk of the arguments I've read fall into the "empiricism" bucket rather than "partisanship," either citing precedent of negative outcomes (portugal) or the industry's proven inability to self-regulate (local monopolies ala comcast, fights against municipal broadband, etc).
I'm also somewhat entertained that maintaining a competitive business landscape has somehow become "leftist." To my mind that's very pro-small-business/free market to prohibit large entities from soley dominating a market and legislating protective walls; even Reagan took an aggressive antitrust stance; this not even touching on that internet looks a lot more like a utility necessary for "survival" in a modern world than a good nowadays.
I would say it was rather irregular that my grandma, who has been dead for several years, thought net neutrality was such a burden on society that she just had to reach out past the grave to let her opinion (that happens to be verbatim the same as many others' opinions) be known.
Regulations can also be much more easily (and quickly, especially in the face of large changes in executive or congressional personnel/party/attitude) reversed, amended, or removed. The "rules" (mostly per-dept) mandating gradual phase-in, discussion, and phase-out of federal department regulations are much more likely to be bent and/or broken in the face of political sea changes. Not necessarily a good thing, but should be noted nevertheless.
Does it really matter? This wasn't a vote and they weren't listening to our opinions anyhow, this was just some jerk spamming a comment box.
What really matters is that they're on the site of the ISPs that want to screw us all over.
I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it.
>I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it.
Fights for control have been going on in various forms since the start, '1978 the Post Office proposed to open a new service, called E-COM' from 'Mail Chauvinism: The Magicians, the Snark and the Camel' by Ted Nelson https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism...
I don't know if it mattered, but the comments as shown in the article are pretty much the same copy with various simple replacements for many phrases. This happens in lots of spam campaigns. I'm not sure anyone spent much time doing it - could be few hours for someone who does spam already. It doesn't look like a sophisticated or costly action.
I wasn't planning to, since we can't answer this without knowing who did it.
My point was just to provide context for "spent time". It wasn't some huge operation. It could've been one day for one person. At that point the cost is so low it could've been done for the lulz. Or it could've been a cheap case of foreign groups trying to achieve something. Who knows.
Just because I have good reason to believe it never mattered, that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with me. Even then, people spend significant amounts of time on things that don't matter (see also: social media, entertainment, etc.).
Given that spamming a comment form is a few lines of Perl - http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod - the idea that some nut might spend 30 seconds ordering their computer to spam the FCC does not strike me as farfetched, nor does it seem reasonable to waste time caring about that.
Better to focus our efforts on lobbying the FCC to change this boneheaded decision. Frankly, I think the point that they don't care about our comments to begin with is more damning than whether or not an idiot spammed a comment box.
Like every company in the tech industry? 'Disrupt' ie break all of the laws and grow faster than you can get sued. Then when you do get sued throw mountains of investor money at it and ask for more.
There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1].
Additionally every campaign, company, even private individual has emails that wouldn't look good if they were leaked to the public with no context.
I'd bet there were emails from the other side that would have been just as damaging had they been leaked. In fact we know there were, because several damaging emails from Donald Trump Jr. have been leaked since.
One more point. Many of the leaked Clinton emails weren't actually damaging in and of themselves. They were damaging because of the conspiracy theories that they spawned. Innocuous party planning emails morphed into Pizza Gate, which was spread in large part by Russian trolls.
Your reference, [1], refers to documents from Guccifer 2.0, which Salon uses to extrapolate that "emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign may not have been as reliable as the anti-Clinton camp would like to believe." But then there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail#Non....
As far as damaging e-mails from the other side, they would probably need to go further than: mocking people with disabilities, attacking gold star families, insulting POWs, admitting to sexual assault, etc. because all of that is on tape.
Not all of the emails were signed. I haven't seen any evidence that even most of the damaging emails were signed.
Additionally there are several attacks potentially available to state actors to forge those signatures. The most probable is to steal the server's private key.
>As far as damaging e-mails from the other side,
How about agreeing to take a meeting with a Russian agent?
Trump only won by about 80k votes in 3 states. The election was very close--a change in weather could've swung it.
You can Google Russian involvement with Pizzagate. It was mostly Russian linked bots retweeting it to push it into trending.
In addition to Russian bots, all the Turkish pro government newspapers were spreading Pizzagate conspiracies.
If an email that wasn't part of the public debate was altered, who cares? The simple fact is that, of all the emails that were covered by the media, the Clinton campaign was unable to point to a single one and say it was altered.
It looks like a very large number of the emails from podesta's inbox weren't signed. I have seen no evidence that all or even most of the emails that were part of the public discourse were actually signed.
Let's not pretend cryptographic signing of emails makes them immune to tampering. This makes it essentially a guarantee that they were not modified between Point A and Point B but that's about it.
I'm not saying they were or weren't modified nor am I saying it's even a good theory they were modified but we shouldn't make cryptographic signing sound more capable than it is.
? Can you explain? My understanding is that the signatures are still on the dumped emails and that one purpose of digital signatures is non repudiation - essentially immunity to tampering.
The most obvious method of attack is to steal the email server's private key. Something a state level attacker is probably capable of.
There were a few other methods of attack proposed when this first came out. The most likely was the vulnerability of 1024 bit RSA that was used here. There are concerns that 1024 bit RSA may be vulnerable to well financed attackers.
>There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1].
And yet nobody denied their authenticity. Getting rid of Bernie, leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign, and on and on were all things that nobody denied doing after they were exposed. Regardless, my point was that the conduct in this case (creating fake data that a very small group of voters may rely on) is far worse than exposing what seems to be undisputed questionable conduct.
YES! Obviously! Because if the campaign could show that a single email was altered, it casts doubt on the entire set. Many people would immediately jump to the conclusion that many emails were altered and disregard the story entirely.
The AP is confident that one of the documents from podesta's inbox was altered. Yet the campaign never came forward to authenticate the original document. So we have a clear case of altered email, but campaign didn't authenticate original.
It's a political calculation. You may have done it differently, but it's pretty clear we have at least 1 case of it happening.
I live in the US but am English and am currently in the UK. Despite all the media hoopla about Jimmy Saville, there has been no investigation about his deep and broad access and connections in UK society (I believe May as home secretary was supposed to be running this before ascending to replace Cameron). nothing has happened there either..lone wolf etc etc...
The apparently deliberate digital astroturfing of net neutrality views is another example of the warping of public perceptions. Most of us only respond to what we are fed as 'news' rather than looking a the evidence and data for ourselves
I'd love to see Trump's emails. But, very curiously, wikileaks didn't release anything negative about Trump. Only seeing one side's dirty laundry is the problem. Don't kid yourself that only one side had it.
I recently watched the 2017 Laura Poitras documentary, Risk, which covers some of the time running up to the election. There's a scene in which Julian, in a candid moment, realizing that Trump is a contender/the candidate (I can't remember which at the time), laments the fact that he doesn't have anything on him. That's not to say that he didn't receive anything after that time, but one possibility is that Julian didn't have anything to release. Hard to prove either way.
The goals of Wikileaks - to deconstruct the military-industrial power elite as represented by Clinton - are more aligned against Clinton than they are against Trump. There is no doubt that Trump may become a member of the power elite eventually, and thus continue the scenario that Wikileaks was designed to defeat - but the 30-year old veteran of power politics simply represents a bigger and more dangerous liability to our freedoms and to the notion of democracy. This can be seen in the countless examples of her cabals' attempt to thwart the democratic process, time and again, during her campaign as well as during her time as an entrenched politician.
Just because there isn't "Damage to the other side" doesn't mean that the target of Wikileaks isn't just as important. Perhaps you've missed the part where Wikileaks intended purpose is to deconstruct the secret power structures that usurp our democratic freedoms - Trump hasn't done a lot of that yet. Clinton has done metric truckloads of it, already, for decades now.
Given that the FCC resisted efforts to investigate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FCC was complit in the fake messages (so they could claim they were in line with public opinion)
After working as a government contracting for many years I'd lean more towards gross incompetency than anything complicit. All the people in charge of critical tech in the DoD that I dealt with here placed their through nepotism and had no clue what they were doing.
Granted I'm not saying anything of this is good I just think it's far more likely that they're all idiots over there.
Given that the emails were like one of many necessary factors[0] for the election result, and the FCC's actions are a direct result of that election, it appears that the latter is a strict subset of the former.
It is also important to point out that absolutely nothing illegal was discovered in the hacked emails. Give me 10,000 emails from anybody, and I'll find quotes that people will not like. Yes, maybe HC was too sympathetic to Wall Street in private. So people voted for the other guy, and now banks can continue to add mandatory arbitration to the fine print. The Consumer Financial Services Protection Agency is about to be gutted. That is the agency that fined Wells Fargo and Equifax. The next offenders will probably get off with a stern warning.
But yeah, at least we know HC's chicken recipe.
[0]: The email hack, the social media campaign, the FBI's back-and-forth on its investigations, and, yes, people's antipathy against HC were probably all needed for the result, considering the extremely slim margins and the popular vote/electoral college split.
If you’re referring to my comment (which is now flagged, for no reason other than it being less than sympathetic to HC’s argument that the Russians ruined the election for her - you have to love HN), I wasn’t flaming anyone. I simply pointed out that IMO this FCC incident is much more serious than what happened in the election. Leaked but real emails about unethical/illegal conduct did nothing more than make the voters better informed about actual facts, while this incident intentionally presented false data to the voters at the FCC, who may rely on it in their decision making. The latter is infinitely worse IMO. One involves better informing the voters, the other involves lying to them.
They are not individuals, but bots by companies. You just have to look at the bots that write pro-comments on HN, Reddit, etc. Think about, who has advantage from it?
