First the FCC calls a surge in traffic from real commenters “malicious,” then labels the good of American citizens “special interests.”

It’s like they buy into the “citizens are enemy combatants out to get you” delusion almost as hard as certain police agencies do.

Reposting repost re: DDOS proof

ecafsub wrote:
reddit user /u/MNGrrl posted a very thorough breakdown of how we know the FCC is/was lying. Go read it.

Reposting in full:

Quote:
We caught them red handed — they claimed ‘cyber attack’ but we have the uptime reports. We have the connectivity reports (their CDN is Akamai – you can view real time attack data for their network — if the FCC site was down, a big chunk of the web would have been too). It would have made big news in the IT/networking world if Akamai hiccup’d… since they were able to handle the world’s largest DDoS last fall. That got noticed… by, erm, everyone. Network Operations Centers all over the world saw it. Did anyone see the FCC DDoS? crickets

There’s evidence that the bot is being run on an API — in other words someone inside the FCC specifically gave access. They have to issue special keys (just like with Reddit!) — and they’re rate limited. They would know who’s doing it instantly, because that API isn’t available for just anyone: You have to ask for it — click on the link, it’ll show you the form; It asks for name and e-mail. Someone from the FCC said as much — it was API accesses, not public-facing. If there was a connectivity issue it wasn’t external, it was internal, preventable, and that’s why they won’t give out the server logs. Because they knew who was doing it, could have stopped it, didn’t, and are letting it continue to happen as we speak. They know exactly which comments are being submitted by bots, and who owns them. Purely for my own amusement, I went looking for the Terms of Service for accessing the API. Click. Click. Aaaand here we are: "FCC computer systems employ software to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts…" :snip: "If such monitoring reveals evidence of possible abuse or criminal activity" :snip: cough Fraud cough "Unauthorized attempts to upload or change information on this server are strictly prohibited". Not going to do anything, FCC? Says what they did is "strictly prohibited"… soooooooo…. crickets

The previous link provides evidence it’s a grand total of… five. Five different copy pasta text; And all sourced from the same stolen identity databases. And the submission times are painfully obvious that it was automated: The number of submissions per second was nearly constant too, like clockwork. And submitted alphabetically. What’s more… They prepared for this years ago. You can say, unironically, "Thanks Obama" for that one. They specifically upgraded the public comments after the last network neutrality comment crush. Rather a lot (footnote: ECFS is the comment system — and it was specifically targeted for a revamp and big bump to system capacity). That capacity wasn’t exceeded — not by the general public anyway. The inflow rate of submissions from John Oliver’s gofccyourself.com came in well under — 150k versus 1.1 million? It’s hard to imagine how they’d add all that extra capacity only to have it fall over dead under a fraction of the load. Someone was even nice enough to make a map of who’s submitting the comments. Look at the first time this happened. Then look at that one. Notice anything? This time around, the map looks like a mirror of the population distribution of the entire country. By the numbers, the whole nation knows about Network Neutrality, across every demographic… equally. Including the deceased.

Oh, they never filed a report with the Department of Homeland Security, which is what every government agency is supposed to do if they experience a cyber attack. Double bonus round, Here’s the FCC’s own page on cybersecurity preparedness and response. And what do they say? "The FCC, because of its relationship with the nation’s communications network service providers, is particularly well positioned to work with industry to secure the networks upon which the Internet depends." Sounds like someone who’d have a plan, you’d think.They claimed to the media something their own policies dictate what the response should be — and they didn’t do those things. It’s right there for anyone who cares to go hunting for the data and published documents. They didn’t file the report because it wasn’t a DDoS: It was access approved by them.

The FCC may be run now by a corrupt chairman but the institution itself was built on transparency and this guy sits in his office with an oversized coffee mug and posts Youtubes about how tech savvy he is. Behold, he can Twitter. Well, he isn’t, actually. His pants are down and his ass is hanging out if you know where to look. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was the FCC. No matter how much him and the rest of the Trump administration tries to silence, coerce, replace, and otherwise generally screw with freedom of information and transparency… those institutions are staffed by tens of thousands of people operating under policies and rules enacted over decades. The FCC doesn’t operate in a vaccum either: It’s part of the internet. An internet catalogued and backed up by the NSA no less. Anyone remember Snowden and metadata? We log the shit out of all internet traffic. There are no logs. That’s damning enough evidence all by itself.

You can’t CTRL-Z that. We have all the proof we need; We don’t need server logs. We don’t need confirmation from them. They can throw up a wall of silence and deny all they want — we have them dead to rights and it amazes me that nobody in the media has come out and flatly said these guys are full of shit beyond any reasonable doubt. This isn’t accusation, it’s not supposition, it’s hard fact. The. End.

Here’s a parting thought: How about we all hit up the FTC and report identity theft? About, erm, what, a million or so cases so far? Let’s subpoena the shit out of the FCC and unmask our identity thieves. While we’re at it, let’s grab their e-mail server too. Something something but her e-mails. I, for one, find it materially relevant how my identity was stolen, and some of that evidence is in the FCC’s possession. That chairman’s a lawyer right? Surely he wouldn’t begrudge us lawyering up.

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EDITs: Added links and some extra details.

EDIT: Press refresh after the edits and… Oh. For those wanting to go to the press: You have my permission to copy pasta this in whole or in part to anyone you want — just link back to this comment or credit me. Thanks.

EDIT: Several users pinged WaPo here; They’re investigating. #WeDidItReddit

EDIT: Gizmodo is too.

EDIT: Hello El Reg! They were nice enough to post the FCC’s statement regarding the DDoS. I’ll save you the trouble of reading it: "We were DDoS’d and the evidence is ███████, using ████ ███████, and we’re ███████. Thanks. "