Federal investigators are looking into whether the mass submission of millions of fraudulent letters on net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission’s digital comment system was a crime as part of a Department of Justice investigation, BuzzFeed News reported on Saturday.
Federal investigators are looking into whether the mass submission of millions of fraudulent letters on net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission’s digital comment system was a crime as part of a Department of Justice investigation, BuzzFeed News reported on Saturday.
According to BuzzFeed’s report, two organizations who had previously received subpoenas stemming from a separate New York attorney general’s office investigation confirmed that they had received new subpoenas from the FBI:
At issue are millions of public comments that were submitted to the FCC—as mandated by law—regarding what was at the time the agency’s proposal to roll back Barack Obama-era net neutrality rules. Over 22 million comments were submitted; while estimates of how many were either fakes (widely reported to have involved mass identity fraud using real names), duplicates, or bulk-submitted form letters vary, there is general agreement that the vast majority were not uniquely written letters. One study by a Stanford University researcher, Ryan Singel, found that there were only 800,000 unique comments, of which 99.7 percent were opposed to rolling back the rules.
