FCC Accused of ‘Dereliction of Duty’ for Lying About Cyberattack – Should the Net Neutrality Repeal be Reconsidered?

What’s the story?

• Several Democratic lawmakers are accusing the FCC and Chairman Ajit Pai of “dereliction of duty” for failing to dispel a “myth” that the agency was hit by a cyberattack during a public comment period on net neutrality.
• When considering new rules, the FCC is required by law to take public comments into account. Did the FCC fail in its duty to gather and consider public comments by falsely claiming people couldn’t comment due to a cyberattack? Should the rollback of net neutrality be reconsidered?
• Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) tweeted:

What’s the full story?

• During the public comment period on net neutrality, the FCC’s servers became unavailable. At the time, Pai and other members of the FCC told Congress that the outage had been caused by a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, cyberattack.
• Last week, however, the FCC Inspector General (IG) released a report which found that the agency lied to members of Congress and the public on multiple occasions because the attack never actually occurred.
• Investigators believe that FCC officials made false statements to Congress, and referred the case to federal prosecutors.
• Here is the critical section from the IG report, in full:

“The May 7-8, 2016 degradation of the FCC’s ECFS was not, as reported to the public and to Congress, the result of a DDoS attack. At best, the published reports were the result of a rush to judgment and the failure to conduct analyses needed to identify the true cause of the disruption to system availability. Rather than engaging in a concerted effort to understand better the systematic reasons for the incident, certain managers and staff at the Commission mischaracterized the event to the Office of the Chairman as resulting from a criminal act, rather than apparent shortcomings in the system.”

What do you think?

The Senate Commerce Committee is expected to grill Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai on Thursday for falsely claiming that his agency was hit by a cyberattack during a comment period on net neutrality. Should Congress reconsider the repeal of net neutrality? Hit Take Action and tell your reps.

—Josh Herman

(Photo Credit: Blackjack3D / iStock)