The FCC lied to Congress about an alleged cyberattack - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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It’s been over a year since Ajit Pai and the Federal Communications Commission claimed that the agency’s comment filing system was subjected to a cyberattack during the height of last year’s net neutrality debate. But after waves of speculation from both the public and Congress, the commission has finally come clean. According to a report published by the agency’s inspector general yesterday, there was no distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and this relaying of false information to Congress prompted a deeper investigation into whether senior officials at the FCC had broken the law.

[...]

By the following morning, senior officials at the commission concluded that “some external folks attempted to send high traffic in an attempt to tie-up the server,” according to emails uncovered by the inspector general. The suggestion was that rather than being shut down by a surge of valid complaints, the site was flooded by fabricated traffic. The assertion came from former chief information officer David Bray. And despite several people disputing his unsubstantiated conclusion in email chains, the DDoS theory was passed on to commissioners, like Pai, who told members of Congress that what happened that evening was “classified as a non-traditional DDoS attack.”

Even if the suggestion that the shutdown was tied to a DDoS attack was made in good faith, the commission should have known better. The FCC knew Oliver planned to run a net neutrality segment on his show. The report recounts a producer of Last Week Tonight reaching out to give the agency a “heads up” days prior to running the episode. This email had been forwarded to the FCC’s chief of staff Matthew Berry, and after discussions with other employees, the agency decided not to respond.

The report does mention that neither Bray nor IT had been notified of the episode prior to it airing, but in email correspondences with other FCC officials, Bray is asked to consider whether the shutdown was the result of Oliver’s program. The commission also knew that Oliver’s show had the power to move enough viewers to crash their system. Just three years prior, Oliver ran a similar segment that media reports said may have shut down the site as well.

In the days following the 2017 FCC event, members of Congress began to question whether there had been a DDoS attack. In a letter to Pai, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) asked a variety of detailed questions in an attempt to get both the agency’s timeline and story straight. On June 15th, Congress received answers, but the inspector general determined that much of what Pai said was untrue. The report states that “in its response to the Wyden-Schatz letter, the FCC made several specific statements that we believe misrepresent facts about the event or provide misleading information.” It was determined that the commission misled Congress when it came to the nature of the alleged attack, the time it occurred, and, most prominently, the agency’s conversations with the FBI following the event.

[...]

The toughest condemnation of Pai’s actions came from Fight for the Future, a net neutrality advocacy organization, which called for Pai to step down. “Ajit Pai should resign. These new revelations from the FCC’s internal investigation are a smoking gun,” the group said in a statement. “They clearly show that the FCC chairman knew months ago that there had never been a cyber attack on the FCC’s comment system, but did nothing, allowing the false narrative to spread in a cynical attempt to downplay the overwhelming opposition to his attack on net neutrality.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/8/17664 ... ngress-doj
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