 at a time out of this busy day to discuss a related but much broader and perhaps more fundamental issues of agency engagement and responsive policymaking. So you'll notice, first of all, that I'm not Cecilia Munoz. Unfortunately, Cecilia had a last minute issue come up and is unable to join us today. And while her shoes are much too big for me to claim to fill, I'm honored to be here in her absence to welcome you to our event and introduce our keynote. My name is Sarah Morris. I'm Director of Open Internet Policy for New America's Open Technology Institute. New America is dedicated to renewing America by continuing the quest to realize our nation's highest ideals, confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change and seizing the opportunities those changes create. Our experts work on a wide range of issues from national security policy to work-family balance and, of course, technology and telecom policy. The Open Technology Institute works at the intersection of technology and policy to ensure that every community has equitable access to digital technology and its benefits. We promote universal access to communications technologies that are both open and secure using a multidisciplinary approach that brings together advocates, researchers, organizers, and innovators. The ability of everyday Americans to interact with their policy makers should be paramount to agency decision-making. While regulatory policy is often guided by input from issue experts and advocates, the common processes for input are open to the public by design. What's good for lobbyists on K Street is often not what's best for everyday Americans. Indeed, public input into agency proceedings can inject those proceedings with real life, lived experiences, and can serve as a critical barometer of public opinion. But recent events at the FCC and at other agencies have compromised the processes for public engagement. Fraudulent comments filed on behalf of real people misrepresent the public's stake in a proceeding and a reluctance to respond to FOIA requests and include consumer complaints filed with the agency in a relevant proceeding obscure the negative real-world impacts of company practices. We're gathered here today to unpack these problems and to move forward towards solutions to protect opportunities for robust public engagement in federal decision-making. I'm excited to hear from both our keynote and all-star panel. And a few housekeeping items before I introduce our esteemed keynote. First of all, just a reminder that when we open up any questions to the audience that you make sure to wait for a microphone so that we can make sure to capture you on any recordings. And that we are using the hashtag, I forgot to double check, this is a comment fraud, hashtag comment fraud, in any comments or questions on Twitter. And so putting aside those housekeeping items, I'm very honored to introduce our keynote guest today, Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenwurzel. Commissioner Rosenwurzel believes that the future belongs to the connected. She works to promote greater opportunity, accessibility and affordability in our communication services in order to ensure that all Americans get a fair shot at 21st century success. She values expanding opportunity through technology and finding creative solutions to our most pressing policy questions. From fighting to protect net neutrality, to ensuring access to the internet for students caught in the homework gap, Commissioner Rosenwurzel has been a consistent champion for connectivity. And she's been a fierce watchdog of behavior at the commission that has compromised or limited public engagement with the agency. As we'll hear her talk about today. Named as one of Politico's 50 Politicos to Watch, Jessica brings over two decades of communications policy experience and public service to the FCC. Prior to joining the agency, she served as senior communications counsel for the United States Senate Commerce Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation under the leadership of Senator John Rockefeller and Senator Daniel Inouye. Before entering public service, Jessica practiced communications law in Washington, DC. So with that, I will welcome you commissioner. We are delighted to have you here today. Oh, thank you, Sarah, and thank you, New America for holding this discussion about bringing the public back in because we all deserve a voice in decisions that are made in Washington. This conversation I think is necessary. It's also timely because this week is Open Government Week. An Open Government Week presents us with the opportunity to ask questions about how citizens can play a role in government decision-making. So in that spirit, let me start with a question of my own. Here it goes. What do Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon deceased actress Patty Duke, a 13-year-old from Northern New York and a 96-year-old veteran from Southern California have in common? Okay, I'll give you. The answer is not obvious, but it's important. You see, each of these individuals appears to have filed comments in the net neutrality record at the Federal Communications Commission. You remember the net neutrality proceeding at the FCC. It got a lot of attention, and rightly so. And before my colleagues made what I think is the misguided decision to roll back our net neutrality protections, the agency sought comment on this issue from stakeholders nationwide. And so it appears that a Senator, a dearly departed actress, a teenager from New York and a non-agenarian from California, went online, submitted their names and addresses, and typed out their innermost thoughts about internet regulatory policy. Of course, appearances can be deceiving. In fact, each of these individuals, along with two million others, had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments in the FCC record. And those fake comments were not the only unnerving thing in the FCC net neutrality docket. The agency received about half a million comments from emails with Russian email addresses associated with them. It received nearly eight million comments from email domains associated with fakemailgenerator.com. And they had all that identical wording. A million more comments were submitted using mail merge techniques that were designed to falsely make them appear like unique submissions. Something here is not right. And what is wrong is not confined to the FCC because fake comments and stolen identities are pouring into proceedings across Washington. They've been uncovered at the Department of Labor, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And James Grimaldi, who is here with us today, is the journalist who documented so much of this fraud in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Now the Administrative Procedure Act is from 1946. It sets up the basic framework for rulemaking at the FCC and at agencies just like it all across Washington. And under this law, when a government agency proposes new policies, it has a duty to give the public the opportunity to voice their opinion. And after considering these public comments, agencies can proceed with their proposed policies, adopt new rules. As long as when they do so, it includes a general statement of basis and purpose. Now this structure has served us well for decades. It's been the solid foundation for every agency that seeks public input for its decisions. Over time, if we've identified deficiencies in this framework, we've made adjustments. And so in 1980, we had the Regulatory Flexibility Act, which amended the Administrative Procedure Act in order to ensure that agencies like the FCC take into account the needs of small business. Plus there are other laws like the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act that have changed this framework in order to respond to other concerns. But what we're facing now is not like what has come before. Because it's apparent that the civic infrastructure we have for accepting public comment in the rulemaking process is not built for the digital age. As the Administrative Conference of the United States acknowledges, while the basic framework for rulemaking from 1946 has stayed the same, the technological landscape has evolved dramatically. Let's call that an understatement. Though this problem may seem small in the scheme of things, the impact is big because administrative decisions made in Washington affects so much of our day-to-day life. They involve everything from internet openness to retirement planning to the availability of loans and the energy sources that heat our homes and businesses. So much of the decision-making that affects our future today takes place in the administrative state. I think the American public deserves a fair shot at participating in these decisions. Expert agencies are bound to hear from everyone. They can't just listen to those who can afford to pay for expert lawyers and lobbyists. After all, the framework from the Administrative Procedure Act is designed to serve the public by seeking their input, but increasingly they are getting shut out. Our agency internet systems are ill-equipped to handle the mass automation and fraud that is already corrupting channels for public comment, and it's only going to get worse. The mechanization and weaponization of the comment filing process has only just begun. We need to do something about it because ensuring the public has a say in what happens in Washington matters because trust in public institutions matters. You know, a few months ago, Edelman released its annual trust barometer and they reported that only a third of Americans trust the government. That's a 14 percentage point decline from the year before. I think fixing that decline is worth the effort. And we can start with finding ways that give all Americans, no matter who they are or where they live, a fair shot at making Washington listen to what they think. We can't give in to the easy cynicism that results when our public channels are flooded with comments from dead people, stolen identities, batches of bogus filings, and commentary that originated from Russian email addresses. And we can't let this deluge of fake filings further delegitimize Washington decisions and erode public trust. Now no one said that digital age democracy was going to be easy. But we've got to brace ourselves and strengthen our civic infrastructure to withstand what's underway. This is true at regulatory agencies and all across our political landscape because if you look for them, you will find uneasy parallels between the flood of fake comments and regulatory proceedings and the barrage of posts on social media that was part of a conspicuous campaign to influence our last election. There is a concerted effort to exploit our openness. It deserves a concerted response. This has yet to happen. At the FCC, for instance, those two million individuals who had their names stolen and misused in the net neutrality docket, well, they've been advised to file another statement to that effect in the public record. Let me put this as gently as I can. That is not a scalable solution. Meanwhile, the agency has refused to work with state authorities who found that they've got lots of residents whose identities have been stolen, and that's not right. For starters, it's at odds with the spirit of cooperative federalism. More critically, the theft of identities like this is often a violation of state law. And for the record, it's also a violation of federal law. Section 1001 of Title 18 makes it a felony for any person knowingly or willing willfully to make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation in matters before the federal government. That makes the unwillingness of our regulators in Washington to address the fraud we already know exists, especially chilling. We should be asking, how did this happen? Who orchestrated it? Who paid for it? We should be investigating, and the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation should be involved. We are looking at a systemic effort to corrupt the process by which the public participates in some of the biggest decisions that are being made in Washington. If we want to build the civic infrastructure to withstand this assault, we need to both understand its origins and take out the rogues who are stealing identities, cheating the public, and destroying our trust. And while we build this civic infrastructure, I think we can take some steps to improve the rulemaking process. Every agency should be performing its own internal investigation. Every agency should heed the advice of the Government Accountability Office, which is right now reviewing the extent and pervasiveness of fraud and misuse of American identities during the federal rulemaking process. Every agency should consider simple security measures like CAPTCHA and two-factor authentication that can enhance security without decreasing public participation. And every agency can do something that is downright old-fashioned. It can hold public hearings. But the truth is, we need to get started because what is necessary to bring the public back in is what digital age democracy requires. Thank you. Thank you so much, Commissioner Rose and Worsel. And with that, I will invite the panelists and Mark Schmidt to come up and take your seats on the stage. And while they're doing that, since I know Mark is introducing the panelists, I will introduce Mark. That's okay. Mark is our director, is the director of New America's political reform program, a program that seeks to develop new approaches to understanding and reforming the market for political power and the crisis of democratic governance. And I will let Mark take it from here. Thank you very much, Sarah. And thanks to Commissioner Worsel and Worsel. I appreciate that description of our program. I was listening to your description of OTI. I was thinking, we need something like that. You know, in keeping with the theme of our program, we're really interested in this topic in the context of issues like net neutrality, but we're really interested in it in terms of democracy and the way in which the comment process is one way in which agencies wanna hear from the public. I used to work on The Hill and it was a big part of what we did was actually try to understand what's real, what's not in that much simpler time. But I'm convinced that most legislators and most agencies, as I've encountered them, actively want to know where the public is. And a process like this is, it's got its problems no matter what, but it's one of the few channels that they really have. And I think reading, for example, James' story about the level of fake commentary really made you feel like the entire body of comments is hard to take, you know, you can't like sift through and say real and fake and focus on the real, it's so pervasive. So I wanna make sure we talk about that in that context and begin to talk a little bit about solutions. So I'm just gonna do a quick introduction of folks and then they'll make some comments and then we'll have some discussion and open it up to the audience. To my left, Carmen Scorato is the Vice President for Policy and the General Counsel at the National Hispanic Media Coalition. Alex Howard is an open government analyst at epluribusunum.org and maybe you'll tell us a little bit about what that is. That's a new role for you. It's actually going back to the future. Okay, all right, we'll let you do it when it's your turn. James V. Grimaldi is a senior writer at the Wall Street Journal and the leading journalist covering these issues. Amit Narang is a regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen. And with that, I'll turn it over to... We had an order, right? Did we have a... I don't know the order. Yeah, I've talked about maybe that. He came going first. Sure, that would be fine. Am I going first? If you're happy enough to order it. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, thank you for inviting me. I wanna also identify Paul Overberg, who was my co-author for the articles in the Wall Street Journal. We take no position on any of the rules, of course, or net neutrality and I just wanted to disclose that although I suspect our editorial page has and I don't even know what that position might be. And I think maybe even the company may have a position which might or might not be different than the editorial page. So I just put that out there. Briefly, what we did was identify five other agencies beyond just the FCC where this problem of fake comments was happening. And it was about a year ago when there were some bloggers who had identified the fake comments and I knew being in Washington for more than 20 years now there was no way that was the first and only place that that had happened. It just happened there, I think, at a scale that we'd never seen before. And then we devised this system by which we, in part due to the openness of the FCC, we were able to identify individuals with email addresses and their comments and then we embarked upon a massive survey of nearly a million commenters to find out whether they had really submitted the comments or not. And we found problems on both sides of the issue. The problems seemed to be worse and certain sets of data that came from so what we would call pro-industry versus what maybe you could call maybe pro-consumer. Although I think there are problems as well with certain consumer groups who may be orchestrating campaigns. And as you know, the history goes back to even writing postcards or letters to fight perhaps even tobacco regulation and legislation as long ago as 20 years ago. Now they've just moved it to where they've kind of weaponized the comment process, weaponized the hacking of democracy. Basically is what's going on, I think in that nice introduction that we had from the commissioner, which happily I think largely endures except for those points that she took on positions on policy. And that's it for me. You have questions or do we move to the next? Why don't we just go through and then we'll do some questions. I mean, you know, whatever questions come up. Am I next? Yeah, why not? Okay, sure. So Amandarang and I work at Public Citizen as was mentioned. Public Citizen chairs a very broad coalition called the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards. And that is a coalition that was formed to essentially support and defend, especially in the current environment, strong and effective regulations that protect the health, safety, well-being of the public, protect the environment, protect consumers, bring about financial reform, especially in the wake of the Wall Street crash, giving you a sense, of course, of how broadly applicable and important regulation is, but then it also is reflective of how broad our coalition is, you know, including so many groups on the progressive lack of a better term, labor, environmental, consumer, financial reform, food safety, good government, and net neutrality actually as well. And so for the coalition, for our members, the ability to engage our supporters, our members, and our activists, to push them to support, just, you know, and advocate for strong and effective regulations through the public comment process has been absolutely vital. It's been, you know, as critical, if not more critical, then a lot of the, you know, kind of insider, inside the Beltway work that's done by health and safety advocates, consumer advocates, the folks that work these issues inside DC. And I think that, as the commissioner said, that has, of course, become much more robust with the development of technology and technology that allows, obviously, much more engagement by virtue of taking it all online. Now, one of the major rationales, as the commissioner mentioned, to moving the public comment process online, generally speaking, the kind of transparency of regulations online, and then the ability to comment when regulations are put up, was to increase the participation in the public participation in the rulemaking process, try to democratize the rulemaking process. And I think another feature, another intent, and certainly it's been one of the positive outcomes of moving the public comment process online, is to try to counter the concentrated capture of the regulatory process in the broader regulatory system by special interests, right before, as the commissioner was talking about, the APA was, the Administrative Procedures Act was adopted in 1946. One of the rationales upon adoption was, look, we need to give the chance for the public to comment on rules that will impact them. That was fairly limited, of course, at that time, because we were dealing with comments that had to be sent in by hand, written on paper, in order to see the other comments, you had to be in DC and you'd have to go to the agency and there'd be some kind of dimly lit room in the basement where they housed all the comments that were being sent in. I've been in those rooms. They do exist. You don't wanna be there for long, and I'm sure you agree. But I can't claim actually doing that in one, but I hear it, yeah. So that was a very limited way for the public to be able to participate. That was obviously changed dramatically with the move to push it all online, the creation of regulations.gov, and then the posting of regulations and the ability to comment through that online portal. And definitely at the time, regulations.gov, the creation of that was billed as one of the best ways to try to get much more public participation. It is, I think the other feature that's so critical is that it does serve, again, going back to what I was saying, as an antidote to regulatory capture by concentrated interest. One of the main functions that a lot of folks point to when it comes to public comments is informing agency rulemaking, but that shouldn't be the only function of the public comment process. Sometimes you get folks talking about, hey, these comments from average members of the public, they're not really in the weeds, they don't inform the agencies as to how best to achieve the regulatory objectives, that kind of thing. And that may very well be true, but it is also important for the agency to have a sense of how much support there is for whatever regulatory measure they're taking or how much opposition potentially there is. And I think the last thing I'll say is that this ability to comment, which is certainly under threat, severe threat with the fake comment scandals and the kind of increasing awareness of it, I should say the increasing scope of it as we're learning. This is really, obviously the public comment process, the ability to comment online is really under threat, but it also is one of the best ways for the beneficiaries of regulations to be able to support and point out the benefits of regulations, right? We are constantly hearing from inside the Beltway special interest that often are opposing strong regulations that protect the public and of course they're laying out their concerns in terms of how much it'll cost them, compliance concerns, that kind of thing. It's equally important, if not more, to hear from the folks that benefit from regulations, both when the regulations are being put in place and when they're being rolled back, as we're seeing right now. And frankly, I don't know that there's a better way for the average members of the public that do benefit from regulations to have their voice be heard by agencies than the online comment process. So we need to find a solution and we need to find it fast, but we need to find one that preserves this ability for average members of the public to comment on regulations that benefit them. Alex? So my name's Alex Howard, until the end of April, I was the deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, which is a national nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses upon better uses of technology, internet technologies, mobile technologies, everything in between to improve public understanding, public access to information, public participation, society itself. Sunlight's approach has always been to say, open is better, make open the default and how we think about things. Since I left there, when I said back in the future, I wasn't kidding, before I joined Sunlight, I was a journalist covering open government, good governance, et cetera. This is a website that I had before it went dormant. I just spooled it back up and one of the first things I'll post on it is about this. Because it's something that was a big issue for me while I was at Sunlight. When we saw this happening at the FCC before I joined Sunlight, we engaged the FCC's then CIO about their new system. If you remember back to 2014, it went down under the weight of people's interest because they had a very old 16-bit system from the 90s and then upgraded it. And the upgrades caused problems. I want to step back just a bit because what the commissioner said, I think, is incredibly important in terms of the scope of the problem and what's coming. You can't have lived through the last two years in the United States and see that the openness of our society has become used against it. That platforms that we thought would be used in more utopian ideals to uplift the public, to empower the public, to hear the public, to bring the public into government have now been polluted. Maybe the metaphor from people in the environmental movement of smog is appropriate. There's disinformation smog because it's not just that people can't comment, they can't, they can send in by mail, right? They can send in by email, they can comment on a website. It's that the process itself is being polluted in such a way that it allows people to delegitimize the value of public opinion as expressed in these areas, to say that it is identical, it is created by interest groups, and that the only ones that matter are the ones from expensive law firms here in the capital, which are of course the very same ones that are lobbying for the industry interest. Public interest advocates are radically outgun in that context, and the activists who are trying to do the best job they can, fight for the future right now, is leading a whole bunch of efforts to try to get people to put pressure upon Congress. And the openness of the comments themselves has great value in terms of understanding where public sentiment could be expressed from that. It's very clear we need to preserve that openness. Indeed it was what allowed you and the team to track back and see who voiced these. But it's also clear the status quo isn't good enough. Something needs to be done to address the problem of these comment systems being polluted by both domestic actors acting as astroturf, right, who are putting in different kinds of things that cause people to have concerns, and external foreign actors. If you set up an API from which you both read comments and write comments, it can be taken down by concerted efforts in the same ways that a distributed denial of service for a website can be used to censor. A distributed denial of democracy can be used to deny people the ability to not only read the record, but be written into it. Now in that context, there's always the recourse of encouraging people to go back to the future themselves, to write letters, to show up in town halls, to email an agency. But in 2018, in the extraordinary age we live in terms of technology, it's, I think, unfair to expect people to go back to older things for this process. There are gonna be a number of things that can be done that we can talk through. Commissioner talked about one, multi-factor authentication. That's what the IRS did when they needed to authenticate people who wanted to download their tax transcript. That got hacked. Tens of thousands of Americans had their identity stolen because the IRS didn't secure it well enough when they tried to make it possible for people to interact with them. They then put in multi-factor authentication, prove who you are. The US has tried to approach identity policy in the past. Something called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Instead of doing what India has done with an odd hard number, which is like a 12-digit social security number tied to your biometrics, they said, we're gonna be identity provider. So telecom companies, maybe social media companies, tech companies, maybe a public entity like the post office, they're certified as identity providers and then they're used to create a little bit of friction to put the comment in. Now, I don't think putting that little bit of friction is wrong. I think that we need to talk about how and where we can ensure that institutions, all levels of government, because this is a problem at the local, state, and federal level, can know who they're talking to so that the process cannot be corrupted so that the very same technologies that clearly have great promise to have every connected American, this is nine out of 10 of us, it's 10% still out there, have the opportunity to participate in this process. Otherwise, I think we'll continue to see regulatory capture. I don't think that these systems are currently preventing that. I think they're creating the illusion that people's voice matters. It's participation theater in the same way that a president standing up with a bunch of empty documents and claiming that their disclosure is transparency theater. We cannot allow agencies to claim that they are fulfilling their civic duties if they refuse to even investigate the prevalence of this, which is what the FCC has done. And I don't think we can let Congress off the hook for taking some simple measures to look at the capabilities that already exist within agencies, like login.gov, as a simple way to maybe improve this. Happy to talk more. I think before I turn over to Carmen, can you clarify a couple of things? When you talk about shutting down APIs, is that something that's happened? So the way that the FCC built its comment system, it's served through an application programming interface. This is something that we and other organizations, say we in the past tense with sunlight, I now as an advocate push for, making data available if you write a simple program to ask for it as opposed to one long bulk bit. APIs over create points of control. And if you build the same API to read from as you write from, it's possible that that could take down the entire system unless it's incredibly robust. Clearly, the FCC didn't do quite well enough on that. Regulations.gov has an API as well. Really important if you're trying to get comments out of it, but they recently took it offline and then brought it back up with a new rule, only one account per organization. That is anti-public, right? There should not be a constraint like that. And that's why sunlight, and lots of other open government advocates always talk about the need for bulk comments. No single point of access, no single point of control. Information is power. Therefore, it's crucial that people are able to get the information and to indeed analyze these comments to understand where sentiment is and to see how many of them were unique, how many of them were responsive to the questions, and then hold the officials accountable for valuing the public's voice appropriately. Alex, do we know why they did that? Do you think it's trying to prevent document fraud? I think that there were growing concerns within the EPA which operates Regulations.gov about both, about the way that the API could be misused and speculatively about different ways that they could track who is accessing public comments. Because when you ask for an API key, then you get to know who's there. Who's the representative from your organization? Who's looking at comments? I think that's fundamentally wrong. I think the comment itself, the record, should be open without any friction. Where there should be friction is understanding who's making the comment and making them accountable for it. This of course is the exact issue with buying paid political advertising and it's why some lightness allies and other people have advanced the Honest Ads Act and pushed tech companies to verify who's buying these ads and to put disclaimers and disclosures on them. Because we should know that. Great, thank you. Carmen. I'm Carmen Scrotta with the National Hispanic Media Coalition. And a little bit of background on NHMC. We're a media advocacy and civil rights organization for the advancement of Latinos. So we work on broadband access and affordability issues and we do take a position on net neutrality. We believe that it's vital to the Latino community and also to all consumers. And we believe that Title II net neutrality is the best way of protecting our access to the internet. So I'm gonna talk about a slightly different issue but related because I think we're talking about the public comment process and the integrity of that process. We not only need to look at what's in the docket and what comments are there, but also what's missing. And I'm gonna take you back a little bit to the beginning of the net neutrality proceeding when we received the draft of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking which was April 26, 2017. And the underlying premise of that Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was that the rules weren't necessary. That they weren't necessary because there weren't any problems. ISPs, internet service providers were not violating net neutrality and therefore we can get rid of the rules. So I started doing a little bit of homework. I went to the FCC's website and there they have a portal for consumer complaints and you can access this portal and consumer complaints are just anything that you or I could submit to the FCC if we think, for example, that our internet service provider is violating net neutrality. Maybe they're blocking our internet access. Maybe we cannot, maybe they're slowing down access to a website. So that's something anyone can do. So I go to this portal, I can filter by net neutrality complaints. Turns out, since 2015, there were about 37,000 net neutrality complaints filed at the FCC. And again, this is only the public-pacing information and there's very little there. There's a little bit about where the complaint came from, where it was submitted, the date and that it was a net neutrality complaint and that's about it. So I go back again to the NPRM and realize that this isn't referenced anywhere in this notice of proposed rulemaking. They don't, it's not in a footnote. It's as if it doesn't exist. So that's when we decided at NHMC to submit Freedom of Information Act requests to the FCC asking for the substance of these consumer complaints. And the idea behind these FOIA requests was that we would get the substance of these complaints as well as related documents, analyze them and incorporate them back into the record so that other interested parties could have the opportunity to analyze it and see how the FCC actually enforced the net neutrality rules of 2015 to then maybe justify whether or not we needed to repeal them. So that was the idea. That's not quite what happened. When we heard back from the FCC, they essentially refused to give us the documents. They said it was overly burdensome and it was just simply too much. So over the course of time, and this through our own advocacy, through the help of our allies, through the help of members of Congress, the FCC turns out to have a change of heart and this is now getting close to the reply common deadline and they start giving us documents, thousands, six days before the reply common deadline ends. In the end, we end up with 50,000 consumer complaints, over 50,000 and about 70,000 pages of relevant documents. The common deadline closes and we file a motion asking the FCC to reopen the comment process and allow people to analyze these documents and see how they are relevant to this proceeding. This is relevant evidence and the FCC, we find out when they release the draft of the order is going to deny our motion. At this point, we did actually commission a preliminary report that really showed that not only were these documents relevant, but they showed that these individuals were experiencing barriers to accessing the internet. They were experiencing net neutrality violations. So again, the FCC just ignored these documents as if they didn't exist and that's why I think we need to talk about what's missing because in the Administrative Procedure Act, we need to talk about relevant facts and why the agency, the agency needs to ground its decision making in relevant evidence and in this case, not only did it ignore the evidence, but it hid it from the public until it was too late. I want to make a quick point in this because when I was at sunlight in 2016, the FCC started putting up these complaint data and they made a big deal about it, but they left something crucial out, the target of the complaint. Now, the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, famously publishes complaints. Director Mulvaney has said he's considering taking that down to the rapturous applause of the consumer finance industry, which does not like having consumer complaints hosted by an agency, particularly the agency, which did take the step of confirming that they were in fact customers of those entities. Now, my colleagues at sunlight way back in the day when they first did this, figured out that the biggest banks were the subject to the most complaints and when they disclosed the complaints, the banks started being more responsive to consumer problem and solving them. We'd expect the same thing to happen to the FCC if it started disclosing complaints about telecom companies. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Verizon and AT&T and Xfinity are not very popular with consumers. And the FCC hosting a database of complaints would map exactly where these problems existed and empower consumers. They shouldn't be half the fight for FOIA, right? This stuff should just be online and it's an example, unfortunately, of regulatory capture. The FCC is protecting the privacy of gigantic telecom companies who are engaged in an anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior. Just wanted to pop in there because that irks me. I think what's interesting here just to draw something out a little more sharply is it seems like there's no question at all that most, if not all of the complaints actually represent real people with real issues that are where, so in that case, the commission is actually saying, in addition to not publishing them so that it serves a public purpose, they're deliberately excluding the information that that provides, which is real information. And then I think at the same time, the other channel of information, which is the comment stream, has been busted in its own way. And I think one of the most interesting things I took from this conversation is understanding that it's not just an external problem of fake comments. An interest in undermining this process altogether, which again has its analog in those who want to undermine the American election system or undermine trust in that system. I mean, there's a strong market at many levels for undermining trust in institutions and this seems like a good example of it. You were starting to say something. No, yeah, so I was gonna say the FCC wanted to repeal these rules without looking at the role it played in enforcing the 2015 rules. And to your point about making that information public, once we did receive it, we actually asked for Excel spreadsheets with all that information. We posted it on our website. And turns out the FCC also did post it on its website as well. But it's in a very hidden URL, but it's there. Maybe that's for a reading room, which they're all supposed to have, but they don't actually put stuff in. Hi, Sean. Are these, does the FCC do anything with these complaints? Do they like call Verizon and say we got 20 complaints about you? They do that. Yeah, so part of the FCC's role in this is that they are the mediators. So a consumer will complain to the FCC when it comes to net neutrality complaint and then the FCC then contacts the internet service provider. And the internet service provider has about, I believe 30 days to then respond to that consumer complaint. Some of the relevant documents that I mentioned that we asked for were those carrier responses. And it turns out we're still in the process of actually getting those responses, but there's 19,000 of those. So carriers were responding to this. They were in the process of ensuring that consumers' concerns were met. Did you see any patterns in them? I mean, so the stuff you can complain about is blocking or throttling or outright on inability to connect different things. There were some patterns that emerged. Interestingly enough, most of the complaints were about data caps and how that affected internet access. But there were a lot of issues where we actually also asked for the Ombudsperson documents. And the Ombudsperson was someone at the FCC who was there to help consumers navigate the open internet order. So you could always, they were there to help you see that you should file an informal complaint, a more formal complaint, mediation, like what was the appropriate vehicle to resolve your issue. So we asked actually for their emails as well. And that's where we saw the most interesting information, which is we saw veterans overseas who were unable to access the internet and they were complaining to the FCC. We saw just so many, we saw an entire city in Winlock, Washington, saying that their internet service provider was consistently giving them speeds below the advertised speeds. And when they complained, they would say, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do. But they were paying so much for that access. And so the FCC had the opportunity to see patterns and to act on those patterns. And that's something that they do with consumer complaints. They just chose not to do it in this instance and also ignore the fact that these complaints even existed when it went ahead to repeal the rules. Can I just clarify? So they put it up, but obviously it's difficult to access the database but it's on the FCC website. But they still made no reference to any of that in the final rule, even though it seems to have been, was it made public before the final rule was? It was made public before the final rule. They do reference our report, our preliminary report and respond to that as well as to the motion that we asked that they set a new common cycle so that people could analyze this and not just have NHMC look at these documents but have all interested parties be part of the process. Okay, thanks. I wanna open this up a little bit and begin to think about solutions. And I'm interested in kind of solutions on two levels, right? I mean, so Commissioner Rosen-Worstall talked about capture and two-factor authentication and all those things within the existing processes. But I wanna also kind of get our heads outside of the existing processes and, Amit, I liked your phrase that it's, you had a great phrase about, oh, that it was that the common process could be an antidote to regulatory capture by special interests. And I was thinking about my colleague Lee Drutman who wrote an important book about lobbying and draws that distinction between organized interests that tend to have a voice and diffuse interests. And most of us are kind of in the diffuse interest when it comes to something like net neutrality. You know, it matters, but it's not what our life is about. It's not, it's not how our... You never talked about it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, of course not, no. For me, it matters, but it's not, it isn't my professional. I'm glad I work with people, but it is, very glad. But for those of us for whom it's one of many, many things that we might care about, it's really hard to organize people, to have a voice. And this is one way of doing that. And I guess, you know, the question would be if it's unfixable, is there some other level of processes? Is there some kind of organized deliberative structure or something like that that any of you think about? Is there any conversation about that? I think the commissioner made a very good point about enforcement because one way to deter fake comments and fraudulent comments is to file charges. And if you file the criminal charge against someone who was trying to defraud the federal government while trying to collect comments, I think that would have a great chilling effect in Washington, D.C. Just like, you know, the charges filed against Jack Abramoff and the Abramoff lobbying scandal, I think had a chilling effect on lobbying abuses and resulted in some reforms in lobbying. And just as the indictment of Paul Manafort is probably one of the reasons we've seen a ramping up of FARA filings for Nature Registration Act filings, so enforcement can be a very powerful thing. And many of these agencies, including FERC, actually put up the law that the commissioner cited, yet they do nothing to really enforce it. And I think a strong referral to the FBI and a conviction would have a chilling effect on filing of fraudulent comments. Another thing I would suggest, which would help us as reporters, is frankly more transparency in what they release. I mean, I look at rules, I see what exactly what they ask people to file when they file a rule. The federal register says that if you're gonna write a letter to us, your personal identifiable information will be released, including your name, address, and so forth. But they don't always require the email address, and if they're filing it via online, they almost certainly have an email address. That would allow us to do what we did, which was massive email surveys in order to determine whether they're actually who they say they are, but it would include, it would increase the transparency so we can look at them and see, well, does Zarg the blog master? If I got that right, name right, that was obviously one of the fake ones that was posted without a real email address. Or a dot-con versus a dot-com email address, we would immediately sort of be able to see that. Unfortunately, we can't get most of that, the email addresses or that information or that level of detail from most that are in regulations.gov. We were able to get that from the FCC, which I give them some credit for posting that. Is it clear to you who you would charge, like if there were to be a federal prosecution, is it clear to you who the, I mean, you know the general zone that they come from, right? Whether they would be based in this country as well. Well, I think that's a red herring. I don't believe that they're coming from out of the country. I think the email addresses were made up. I don't know that for a fact. I think it'll be investigated. It's possible, but I doubt it. No, I think that there are firms who sell, you know, who actually sell a product that they would be able to provide bulk comments on a rule for whatever side, by the way, both sides of any issue, both sides of net neutrality. They don't care. They're ready to be hired. They're both liberal and conservative firms and pro-regulation and anti-regulation firms that sell this service to anyone who's willing to pay for it, right? I think that they would be one place that you would look. I'm trying to find them. And if anyone knows who they are, my email address is james.gremaldedwsj.com and I'm also on Signal or, you know, I can take a brown paper envelope slid under the door. Any way that you might know that they might exist, we wanna find out who's doing it. We're still working on this story. If you have any suggestions, also have rules to investigate. But I think it's findable. And one way it could be findable is actually release the internet protocol addresses. Maybe they won't, that are from where the people are filing this and maybe they don't wanna release it to the former attorney general of New York State or his successor, but maybe they should give it to the general accountability office or a congressional committee or the Federal Bureau of Investigation because if you have 100,000 or a million comments coming from the same IP address, I would say that would be circumstantial evidence to begin an investigation. And that IP address could lead you to the to the computer or the farmer wherever it came from. I mean, you know, the FBI investigates this. They investigate hacking. They investigate cyber crime. They're investigating the hacking of our election. They investigate corporations who, I'm sorry, investigate foreign governments who try to hack into corporations to seal corporate intellectual property. Why can't they apply those very same tools, which was suggested by the commissioner today to finding out who's back, who's trying to hack democracy, who's trying to hack the comment system? The dot-con thing is gonna keep. Or give it to me. Yeah. And Paul. That dot-con thing is gonna keep me chuckling all day long. Talk about self-identification of fraudulence. Okay, so I'm very concerned. And I think that, you know, I can speak on behalf of the broader coalition as well that proposed solutions are going to negatively impact or limit the ability for our groups to engage our members and form comment campaigns. You know, it's often referred to as that, sometimes pejoratively, right? And I'm not sure that there is necessarily a clear, obvious substitute. I mean, you know, town halls, public hearings, you still have to physically get there. That also relies on agencies being willing to do that kind of thing, which is less the case under this administration. That said, and this is an idea that I haven't really cleared with anyone. So at the risk of getting in a little hot water, you know, it could be something out of the interest of trying to, you know, preserve these form comment campaigns that we feel have been effective. Maybe it should be incumbent on those who use form comment campaigns, public interest groups that engage in them, to actually make transparent. We do, in certain ways make transparent. The comments that have been generated by those campaigns, literally just put them on the web. I mean, we often do petitions where the petitions, signatories, the petitions are, I mean, we've filled, you know, it looks like discovery sometimes, the petition boxes that we're willing into Congress or an agency because it's so massive. So maybe that's the way to do it. I don't wanna have to print those out necessarily. But yeah, I mean, maybe there is a way to try to have public interest groups take responsibility in kind of a firewall way by making our comments more transparent. What does public citizen do in order to prevent a hacker who may be, say, pro environment or pro regulation from using your systems that you have on your website and writing a simple, you know, what do you call it, a program that would then take fake names or, you know, dark web email addresses and use it to sort of lard up the FCC net neutrality site? Yeah, I hate to admit it, I have no idea. That is not, that is not in my portfolio and I'm thankful it isn't, but I'm worried that it will become part of it very soon. You know, so you can understand that in terms of the technological expertise here, I'm pretty limited, but I have heard, you know, me too, that's why I brought Paul. I need a, I guess I need a Paul. Yeah, I've heard second hand that it is not so obvious that what appear to be simple authentication measures will preserve the ability for us to go out to our members and solicit form comment. I have a difference of opinion with public citizenists and I've expressed it privately and I'll express it publicly now, particularly that I'm just representing me. I don't think the status quo is sustainable. I think this idea that we need to have open websites where anyone can post anything that they want, including fraudulent use of people's real names, is not okay. And you believe in CAPTCHAs. I think that a CAPTCHA is not too much of a barrier and that if it is too much of a barrier for someone you need to provide alternate means by emailing the comment or mailing the comment or providing some way for that person to get that comment to the agency. You cannot take away email, you shouldn't take away snail mail, but it's also clear that there need to be some way of tying the comment to the real person and letting people who have had their rights to comment to participate taken away from them because their identity has been stolen by some actor and stolen to one of these shady firms to give them recourse. Now, identity theft and misuse and abuse is a growing problem in American society. Everybody knows about data breaches. Hundreds of millions of people's identities have been taken away. This is one of the things they're gonna be used for. So we can either sit and say, don't do anything, continue to let anyone file anything and say anything they want and don't change it because we don't wanna have our interest groups' ability to put in bulk comments affected or you can approach this with both hands. Get the agencies to acknowledge they have a problem. Get Congress to hold hearings. Get them to talk to technologists and privacy rights and human rights activists and experts and start to put in better means. Now, in the private sector, there are bazillion ways for consumers to put pressure upon companies, from Dow Jones to New America, right? Using social media, using petitions, using websites that are tied to their identity and consumer groups have great success. Look at what the Parkland students are able to do right now with organization around these issues. Whether you like it or not, they're clearly showing what network movements do. Congress hasn't caught up. DC hasn't caught up. They are seeing a huge volume of people talking that has been polluted by disinformation and misinformation, fake news, fraudulent news, fraudulent comments. And if we don't start thinking through how we're authentication and verification are part of this, I think we're gonna be in a worse place because it will enable these captured regulators and people in Congress to say, we don't have to listen to all of you online because enough of you are fake and enough of you are acting fraudulently that this doesn't count. So, but you're saying that you think that these things that are being proposed by Alex here actually might be a deterrent or an obstacle for people to be able to post their comments online? Well, I think that, I think the devil and the details that I worry about is anything that requires more resources, funding or capacity. I mean, that is clearly- You mean by the agency? No, by us. By the citizen who's comments. So let you all submit and file a bulk comment. That's what happened in 2014, right? There were literally millions of comments that got filed as an attachment through email to the FCC. And many of those were fake, too, we found. So that's not a solution necessarily. It's responsible what he's asking for, which is to make sure that they don't lose the ability to submit huge amounts of comments into the record, which is a really issue for interest groups, right? We can't say you can't put stuff in. We can say, can you attest that to your knowledge there's no fake or fraudulent comments in here? But here's the rule about- I agree, that's an issue. I mean, if our comments are getting corrupted, that certainly would be an issue for us. Well, if you go to the, you know, talking about the FCC's role in this, right? I think when you talk about solutions, you have to talk about the role that the agency plays and their interest and motivation in upholding the integrity of the proceeding, right? Because in this case, when we're just talking about fake comments and the consumer complaints, the FCC was on notice that this was happening throughout the proceeding, and then chose to do nothing. And I- Well, just in fairness to Chairman Pye, since he doesn't have a representative on the panel, and we haven't surveyed it, but the number of comments on the earlier net neutrality were so large, I would be very, maybe we should survey it, I would be very surprised if there weren't fake comments there, too. So I think this is a government-wide problem that is not just this, Chairman. I think it's, I don't see a single agency that's really got a plan to deal with it. And I don't think it would, and I think it was a problem in the Obama administration, and as much as they sang the praises and talked about open government and data and big data, and this would be the solution to eliminating FOIA, I think they said at one point, they were suggestive of that, oh, data will be, we don't need to worry about data. They did not solve or prevent this problem from happening either. When you say there were fake comments in the earlier rulemaking, you mean- I'm saying I suspect you were. I don't know that for a fact. I just want to make clear the definition of fake comment is this person didn't actually comment, right? This person doesn't exist. Not that there are a thousand of identical wording, right? Yeah, let me, let's go through definitions. Because there are a variety of definitions. One is the commenter clearly does not exist, the Blargmaster, or Barack Obama, or Senator Leahy. So, didn't actually file. Actually, Senator Leahy and Barack Obama, we know exist, but we know that they did not file those comments. So someone whose identity was stolen. Other people whose identity was stolen who are not famous, who we don't know clearly didn't file it. Or might have been stolen through a hack like the Yahoo hack or one of the other many, many hacks we've all been hacked, right? Accounts that data then used to create a template comment or someone had a template and then posted it online. And then the final thing, and I'm sure there's several others, but one of the last things that Paul and I found were these jumbled up comments where clearly a lobbyist or lobbying organization would write, you know, 50 sentences that would support their point of view. And then they would get a computer program that would jumble up those sentences into a thousand different orders or more even an infinite number of order. So that it appeared to be a unique comment when in fact it was not a unique comment. It was actually, and it was not submitted by that individual, you know, we found dead people who supposedly had filed what looked to be a unique comment that was actually generated by a computer. Right, and but you also, in one of your cases, it was like 72% of a particular set of comments. Right, so that we took some templates. Yeah, we would take a template that would be either fight for the future or one of the pro ISP groups and we surveyed both sides and we found problems on both sides. So there was one organization that was, I think in the end, had more than a million comments and we surveyed a big chunk of those and found that they were in the 70 to 80% range in which the individuals that we reached said, I did not file that comment. And we had a pretty good deviation of plus or minus on some of those surveys, we were able to get enough survey responses back that we were in the plus or minus of three to 5%. Others, we had such low response rate because they went to zombie email addresses. The email address didn't exist. It was a fake email address. And in many of those cases, our response rate on our surveys was like under 1%. I think, didn't you wanna comment, Carmen? Well, I mean, one thing I was just gonna say when you talk about, you know, the fake comments and some people said this wasn't me, there was a letter that went to the chairman at that point with a lot of individuals saying, I didn't make this comment, please take it down. And procedurally, that would have been an easy fix. Just take the comment down, that person authenticated it wasn't them. And then that's why I was saying that they chose to do nothing in that. And that is the same policy. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but it's the same policy FERC has on the very same thing in which people send in not only letters, but sworn affidavits in which they said, I did not file this comment. And all they do is take that letter and put it up against the other comment, as opposed to actually taking the comment down. Despite the fact they were asked to take the comment down. So just a couple of years ago, I had a neat opportunity here in DC. It wasn't here, it was in another form. To ask Bob Khan and Vince Cerf about anonymity on the internet. Now if you know those guys, they're the ones that came up with internet protocol. And they looked and they said, okay, you can see it, it's in a Google talk. Look, there are some things that we want to have anonymity preserved for. Especially in the era of whistleblowing, right? And there are some things we need to be absolutely sure. You are the person in that chair, right? And that could be things like military operations or you accessing your health record or maybe your taxes. And in between here, there's all this gray area. And this idea that we should not have to verify that you are who you are in the public commenting process which is part of your interaction with government. I think it's something we have to interrogate a little bit. Like, where is this gonna be set? How many layers of authentication do we wanna put? I think it's a really important value to make sure we don't chill people's speech by exposing their comment in a way that makes it negative. We've seen that happen, right? Unpopular ballot propositions, when people's names go on them, they can then be targeted. This happened in Proposition 8 in California. It's gonna happen again and again where people taking positions, being on the record, comes back to them and they have consequences for their speech. The consequences seem to be popcorn from lunch. But at the same time, if we want this process to be rulemaking, they have integrity, then there may be some place you slide the dial where we say authenticate yourself using a second factor. Let me ground this into a real example. There's another place where people can comment online right now, petitions.whitehouse.gov. Unexpectedly, the Trump administration kept around an open government initiative from the last administration. They ignored it for the first year and they took it down and said, we're gonna fix it and they brought it back and nothing was different. But they started replying to them. The trouble is, you don't have to authenticate yourself to use this platform. So, the legitimacy is undermined because we don't know if everyone who is signing petitions is actually an American citizen. Now, if you could verifiably say 100,000 Americans or a million Americans said we wanna see Donald Trump's tax returns, then you have something that has legitimacy beyond anonymous comments that could be signed by anybody. The way to fix that, I think, is to tie your petition to social network, which actually the last Obama White House made sure you do. You wanna share this petition because it's gotta get 150 signatures to be visible. Tie these comments to people's identities that they acquired elsewhere on the web or give them some other means to authenticate if they don't wanna have a public social media account so you don't wanna force people to ever do that. You don't wanna force people to use Facebook. Then that can be some way of verifying that they are who they are and that they own that comment. And they also maybe have some more attention to whatever issue they're pushing for. But again, I don't think that there is an absolute good to having anonymous comments and rule makings because of the obvious demonstrated potential for abuse, harm, misinformation, and the pollution of our public sphere. This is super hard, which is why we want Congress to work on it. And maybe, you know. I think if I could just, just a thought on that because I do a lot of work on campaign finance reform and some of the issues around transparency there. And I've kind of learned to respect that there are, there is a place for anonymous political speech and that Supreme Court has held that. It's interesting, you know, here, it's not an, you know, identity per se isn't what's important. Like identity per se is super important if I access my health records or my tax transfer. That actually has to be me. The purpose of what you're trying to do here is make sure that if there are comments from 100,000, if there are 100,000 comments, they represent 100,000 people, right? It doesn't matter that one of those people is out of power or not, right? That's irrelevant. So it's for the purpose of individuation. As opposed to being CA-bot or a program? Right, right, exactly. Which is, I guess, a little different. We can open it up if there will, I'm sure, be comments. And please wait for the microphone and maybe say who you are and if you have an organizational affiliation. You have to authenticate yourself to comment. Please authenticate yourself with the Project and Government Oversight. And I wanted to jump in particularly at this point because I wanted to push back a little bit on Alex's point about anonymity in the commenting process because I think there is an argument to be made that we should allow for anonymous comments. There are people working in an industry sector, say the energy industry sector, who disagree with their employees on an environmental rule, who don't want them to be able to be looked up or professors working at a particular institution who have a viewpoint that they think other professors are going to challenge them on or think differently because that comes out. There's a variety of reasons why people may not want their name associated with their comments. So the idea of someone connecting and saying this is my comment, I own it, I'm not sure that's 100% true. I agree with the, it has to be a person. I agree there needs to be some friction created to get rid of this problem, but I also think we need to create a process that allows people to participate potentially anonymously. You can't be anonymous now unless you use a fake name. Like your names are disclosed as part of the public record. Correct, and they use fake names. Not always. Some of these comments on rules. I see comments without names all the time. So, I mean, and it's not a great solution to use a fake name and a, you know, grabbed email account that goes nowhere or, you know, something like that, but right now there is a process and it's, again, it's not a great one, but I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't want this to become this idea that you have to put your name on the comments. It's about the content of the idea. It doesn't matter if someone has a great idea about an environmental rule or a labor rule and the agency scratches their head and says, you know, we hadn't thought of that. It doesn't matter who came up with it. Do you think that people who aren't United States citizens or residents should be allowed to participate in our federal rule makings? Absolutely, without a doubt. Okay. If there's a scientist in England who has a great idea because of something they did in England, I want them in that public comment process. I don't see any reason. Again, now the agency gets to look at all these comments, they just consider them. This is not a vote, just because they got 100,000 doesn't mean they automatically go that way. It's informative. I do think it's a great organizing tool. It informs Congress, it informs the agency about where people are and we should try and protect that. But I've seen comment processes where environmental groups have gone to EPA and gathered hundreds of thousands of people to write in. I've actually, I did a report where we had, we counted them all and then there was like 32 supporting the agency's proposal. And the agency went ahead with the proposal, almost unchanged. And so, and that was because that was what the agency wanted to do. And so, and I don't, I still think we need the comment process. I think it's helpful to agencies that are really gonna use it. But I don't wanna start creating massive barriers to anonymous comments or international comments for that matter. Yeah, I think you make a good point but I wanna follow up on Alex's question. What if it's a Russian government agent should she be anonymous? Can she be, should she be? You know, I mean, again, you know, unfortunately we have, we have this, I mean, right now, given certain things in place right now, we have this idea that if someone's from Russia, they're automatically an enemy. But, you know, you- Why said a government agent? Right, but it could be a government agent that actually has a good idea. How about a Russian government bot? Well, that's where I said, you know, I don't want, I don't want these automated, I don't want these to be people. I mean, I think this has to be an individual. But they are, like, you're here. And it's gonna get much worse, especially with the APIs. And I have no problem with CAPTCHAs and other tools that will help to screen out and then tools on the back end that help to identify and then bin comments that do make it through, because they're gonna make it through. But I don't think we, we should be knocking someone out because of where they live. How do you prevent your person who's needs to participate from being binned? What's that? You said some comments are gonna be binned. How do we make sure that process of binning doesn't remove people who you think should be in the process? You know, again, it's a set of, it's gonna be a set of tools that agencies are gonna have to use and then report on how they're using them. Because that is a possibility of any of this. We, some groups complain that they send in 10,000 comments that are practically identical. And the agencies right now put them all in a single bin and say, we got 10,000 comments that, and they'll post one example of it and say, here you go. And they won't post the 10,000 comments. From a management point of view, I understand why they're doing that. It hasn't stopped them either from knowing that 10,000 comments got in nor does it stop them from managing it in such a way that they aren't overwhelmed. I mean, it's a, I mean, there's, it seems to me there's a place for anonymous comments that are just, but you have to label them anonymous comments because if you label them something else, you're calling them something else. And we discount, you know, anybody who's had a blog knows their commenters you take seriously because you don't know their real name, but they're using the same identity all the time and they have a certain expertise and then they're just random people that you ignore. There also is room for both hand here too. We could have some kind of technical mechanism that confirms that someone actually exists as a person but chooses not to put their name on the record. Right? There's a room for that just as there's a room for bulk submission over email or from a given interest group. Just the risks of automation, deluging open platforms for comments in a way that fundamentally poisons the potential of modern technology to enable distributed populace is to participate. It's pretty clear. And I don't think that we should give in to the like banalities of the moment as opposed to the opportunities to make something better. Like maybe we'll have an administration that really wants to use the internet to inform the public and get them to participate in rule makings again and we'll have a chance to remake this. Maybe Congress will have an office of technology assessment that recommends it. The part of the question about people wanting to be anonymous from say their employers who have a different view. Just a question I'm curious about. We had an event a few weeks ago with a young political scientist named Alex Hotel Fernandez has written a great book about political pressure in the workplace which takes a lot of and he's done a lot of survey research. There is a lot of that going on. Of like, if you vote for Obama you'll have to lay off half of the company that kind of thing. Up to coercing people to make contributions. How much of the comment process has been corrupted in your view by employer pressure to submit comments? It's not a big issue. Well, we looked into that and I don't have a whole lot of evidence. I don't think, yeah, but there's some suspicion that that's there. And we're definitely interested in looking at that. It seems to me, I think a colleague may have actually written a story about that, but. I think I know what story you're talking about. Maybe it's the same anecdotal example but I don't also have any kind of aggregate sense of it but the anecdotal example that definitely caught our eye and I do believe it was reported out by the journal was the rulemaking that the CFPB took up on payday lending where we were seeing essentially payday lenders. Well, that's right. We had that in our story. I forgot about that. So thanks for reminding me about my own story. So we. It's reminding me it was you that wrote it. Yeah, yeah. So, but I was actually thinking of another example that was even more explicit that might not have been published. So I want to stick with the one we did write about. So we did the survey. We were able to extract some email addresses based on PDFs. Paul was able to extract email addresses and comments and we surveyed them and we got some response back from employees. And one of the employees in my story and our story said she actually, what happened was they were encouraged to get their clients at payday lenders to actually fill out surveys. I'm sorry, fill out a comment with the CFPB saying how much they love payday loans. And so they had a contest in their offices and whoever, whichever employed office that payday lenders was able to get people to fill these out electronically would get a free lunch. Well, this office was not very motivated for the free lunch and they had submitted one comment. So they came to the employees who were in trouble because they had submitted only, they only got one comment submitted and they were told that they had to fill out the survey. Well, this person actually had taken out a payday loan, answered the survey which then generated a comment. One of these comments that had, based upon how you answered the survey, it created and concocted a sentence that matched their answer. What turned out that the sentence that it concocted for her was false because she said she got a payday loan to fix her car because that was one of the choices. But the car was her tire and it was a hole in the tire and it was not to take the car to the auto shop which was the auto generated comment that was posted on the CFPB in favor of the payday lending and she didn't need to ever take her car to an auto, didn't need a payday loan to take her car to an auto shop because her family owned an auto shop. So yes, employees have been forced to actually post comments online and I suspect it's more widespread than that anecdote. Yeah, okay, other questions right in the middle here. Hi, Brennan Bortalon with National Journal. Talking about enforcement going after identity theft, that kind of thing. I wonder if any of you guys have any idea on how Attorney General Snyderman's resignation might impact specifically with the net neutrality investigation and all the fraudulent comments. Do you think that's gonna have a major impact in the investigation and what the AG's office might do going forward? Which litigation is that? He's investigating, well the office he and was, the office was trying to get data and information out of the FCC. I'm not familiar with a lawsuit that he filed. I kind of doubt it, but I don't know. I suspect that whoever comes in will just continue with what they were doing there. And they started their investigation about the same time Paul and I started ours where we were trying to figure this out on FCC. But it could, but I sort of just, knowing how AG offices work, typically once you kind of get rolling on an investigation, unless you changed parties or something. But I also don't think he's getting very far with the FCC in terms of getting anything out of him. I mean he decided to go public, he said because he wasn't getting much response from the FCC, but having looked at the letters back and forth it didn't look like the FCC was backing down. Would a different Attorney General, maybe politicized Attorney General, get a better response from the FCC? It's not clear to me why any state Attorney General is gonna get a different answer from an FCC that has declined to comment or answer basic questions about what happened to divulge whether it opened an investigation, its findings of the investigation to answer really fundamentally simple questions from Sunlight, which they simply ignored, or from other reporters who asked them as well. Like the place that they need to be hearing from is House oversight, right? There needs to be a check from Congress asking about whether they are investigating fraudulent use of Americans' identities and their rule makings. How many people had their identities used? What did you do about it? Was there a use of the API and automation that caused them to not be able to get access if they were legitimate? Did you reply to people? Have you taken any steps to prevent the fraudulent use? Like these are super basic questions and in the previous administration I could at least get somewhat straightforward answers even if there was a no comment. Can't do that in the last year. And I haven't know other reporters who have either and the FCC isn't itself coming forward. It's up to Congress at this point or in theory other parts of government. I don't think the states are gonna do it no matter who is the AG. That's my own opinion. I think both parties have a vested interest in making sure the comment system is not polluted. So I just wanted to make that point. Yeah. If you were able to identify the people organized as you talked about before with the sort of, it's sort of beyond AstroTurf. Like we know what AstroTurf is and this is a level. If you were able to organize those folks if you were able to find 20,000 people whose identities were stolen in Pennsylvania the Pennsylvania Attorney General could presumably charge whoever committed that act right if you could. I think there's a federal law that might apply. I'm not a lawyer. You're a lawyer. We had a lawyer on the panel. But, and they're probably lawyers in the room. And you're a lawyer, right? Yeah. So the, when I was reading the law the federal identity theft is designed primarily for stealing someone's identity and using it for financial purposes. But when I last looked at it there was a clause in there that also said you can't steal someone's identity and use it to defraud the government. And this sounds like that to me. Hi, I'm Richard Skinner. I'm also a former Sunlighter. And there's a natural analogy between these sorts of fake comments and the sort of fake news that we saw during the last election. And it's easy to point to many, many examples of fake news on social media and elsewhere. But generally a lot harder to make the connection between fake news and people's voting decisions in part because things like partisanship and ideology already are such strong predictors that maybe what happened mostly was just people kept getting their initial opinions confirmed. So the analogy then expands to these fake comments in that we can point to all these fake comments and fake identities and so on. But can we point to actual regulatory decisions that might have been changed by all these fake comments or was it just where they just simply ignored because maybe some regulatory agencies just don't care that much about public comments? Or was it a matter of the process being just so polluted that we can't tell if fake comments affected any actual regulatory decisions? Well, we can talk a little bit about what the impact has been and what the law requires. And you're probably more of an expert on the Administrative Procedures Act, but the APA requires that the agency consider all the comments as part of the rulemaking unless it's one of the emergency interim rulemakings which by the way ballooned in the last administration according to a recent GAO report from a couple years ago. But that aside, they're required to look at it. If they don't actually consider those comments, it can come up in litigation. And there have been court cases in which judges have told the federal agency, you didn't consider those comments when you made this rule, go back and consider those comments. Third, I think it will often requires the agency somewhere up to a year to read all the comments including the fake comments and the astroturf comments in order to analyze them which has the effect of delaying the rule which might be another motive involved with actually doing this. And then lastly, it's used for public opinion and to motivate public opinion. So right before our story ran, the payday lending industry had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which they said there were a million comments from our clients who said they love paying loans and please don't pass this rule. And then we wrote our story saying, well, there were a lot of fake comments in the payday lending rule. So, and then that's then that op-ed, of course, you know how this works, right? They take that to the grass tops, not the grass roots. So here we have the grass roots and they go to the grass tops or whatever and they get mayors or governors or members of Congress and they say member of Congress. The CFPB has written this really stupid rule. We would like you to overturn it. Well, why? Well, because we have a million comments that were in the record. Look at all these, which may or may not be real, please write legislation or a writer which will reverse or repeal the rule. So your question was more binary. Does it have an impact or do they ignore them? And it's much more subtle than that. Yeah, and I'm not sure that it matters really. You know, I think the ability to maximize public participation is its own good, irrespective of how it influences agency action. I'll say on the legal end. Boy, if there is some kind of, you know, conscious strategy, legal strategy to fake comments in order to, you know, undo rule makings on an APA basis in court due to, you know, the agency not considering those fake comments, we're in a completely different world in a horrible, horrible world. And it adds, you know, kind of puts the existing concerns on steroids. I'm not seeing that, and frankly, I'm not seeing anything in the legal literature either that is looking into exactly what the, you know, what the legal contours are of agency's responsibility on the APA to respond to comments when those comments are fraudulent. And exactly how to demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the comments. This really gets us into some very uncharted territory. And I mean, you know, it's hard enough for agencies to defend their rules in court these days, frankly, regardless of the administration. And so I'll also say that if that is a problem, it's a problem for this administration, and it's a problem for every administration going forward. It's not a partisan problem. It's in, you know, agency's ability to defend their rules in court, whatever the administration is problem. So I agree with you that in terms of, you know, responding to the fake comments that were not quite there yet in terms of the law, but I think we're there in terms of the agency having to analyze the docket and what's in the proceeding and then come back with this is what we see, right? And that's not something that the FCC did in this proceeding. They didn't look through all of the comments and then provide an analysis. Like, we think these, you know, X amount come from these email address, X may be fake, here are the ones that we believe are real, and then come to a, you know, an order based off of that. We had that question, the FCC said, well, look at the footnotes and the footnotes refer to comments, but the footnoted comments refer, footnotes refer to comments that were all produced by basically individuals on letterhead. And so primarily law firms. And let me just say one thing, and sorry for the legal speak, but, you know, it definitely is the case that lack of consideration of relevant comments is an APA violation and results in a rule that's arbitrary and capricious, but it's not the same, it's not to the same level of lack of relevant evidence that's available to the agency. That is a stronger violation of the APA, and that's what it sounded like to me when you were talking about it, and that's why I asked you the question earlier, did they consider or reference in any way, you know, the data when it was revealed in between the proposed and final rule, because if they had not referenced it in any way, that seems to me, you know, ignoring relevant evidence that's available to the agency. Very quickly, no, I don't know evidence of where comments have changed one way or the other. I think that there's a strong belief, I think, in people who watch, say, the open internet order that went about net neutrality, that the agency was gonna do what it wanted to do, and that the political makeup of the commission was gonna lead a certain way. The thing that is being lost is further public trust in the integrity of the process itself, and if they see that it is something that is corrupted by fake or fraudulent use and the government doesn't act, then it could further depress the thing which I think people want, which is more public participation in the process in a way that they feel like they will be heard. And if instead the outcome is that the regulated industries continue to win their deregulatory battles, then my expectation is that the historic lows of public trust and government institutions and the capacity of independent regulators to act and behave the behalf of consumers will continue to fall, which is not something anyone should want no matter what party you belong to. I think there was a question up here in the second round. In the interest of transparency, my name is Gloria Tristani. I'm with NHMC. I'm also a former FCC commissioner from the Clinton years. Oh, and I'm also a lawyer. Thank you for your service. But I'm more, my question comes more like the citizen. I care about the process at the FCC for obvious reasons, but I really care about process in America. That's one of the things that was supposed to make the United States different. We have process here. We have courts that overturn when the process is abused. So I very much care about this particular proceeding where there have been fake comments filed. And I think part of the problem is we don't know where they came from. So that's a big, we don't know if it was a concerted effort. I think we could find out. Well, no, but. If someone investigated. Well, and that would be lovely. I wouldn't be surprised if it came from industry, but we don't know. So I really am interested in a process, in a reform, making sure that public comments or whomever comments are legitimate are from whom they come. I think there should be room for anonymous comments as well. Maybe just put anonymous. But I am concerned if you make it so onerous or invasive of the citizen's privacy in finding the comment that you're gonna deter what you want. So I'd like specifics of what you would propose. And no, no, because you mentioned India. But I think that was based on fingerprinting. It's based on eyes. Yeah, I don't want to change those. I don't want my eyes to, you know, so. So is there a way to do it where? So. Then isn't used for others. She's asking. Thank you. Yes. Yeah, Alex Howard. So in the consumer space, this is a real problem. People complain about fake comments on Yelp. Businesses complain about this, right? That they're putting stuff up and they're trashing them. And this is important because people go check the Yelp page. The healthcare community is concerned about the phenomenon of people reviewing their doctors and are these, you know, true or not. The CFPB has this big tension right now. Mulvaney wants to take it down. We know that at least they've confirmed that these people complaining are actually consumers. Amazon has a big problem, right? With people trying to write fake reviews. So what they've started doing is making sure you're a validated buyer. You actually bought the book. And now you get to be, you have a designation that you actually bought the book. I think that there's really good arguments that have been made for why we should allow synonymous comments, right? Where people don't put their name on it, but maybe they're validated, they're a person. So you can't have huge amounts of automated programs posting millions of comments that have been mixed up, matched, fraudulently pulled in. So there's some mechanism where you do this. Americans have gotten pretty familiar now that there's need to identify yourself to your bank online, to identify that you own a social media account. To otherwise put in a pin, right, when you get your money out, to do something which says that you're you. We are justifiably resistant to the idea there should be a national database we get authenticated against when we do something. We're not into that. Interestingly, neither is New Zealand or Australia or the United Kingdom. And the way that we approach that is to have a federated identity system where we validate who can be a provider of identity in a given transaction. The Obama administration didn't do a good job with it. And now this administration has part of it in the General Services Administration, called ATNF, which has built this thing called login.gov, which is trying to create a really simple identity layer. I think any of this stuff doesn't work unless it's as easy as can be. It needs to be as easy as can be just like all these scooters popping up around town, right? You open up your phone, you download the app, you put in a credit card, you interact with it through your email, you can now scan and drive away. It's connected you to some kind of credential. If you've identified yourself to the company, now you can interact with the object. That's a commercial interaction, not a government interaction. But I think that the future is already here. We're going to see people taking other people's identities or falsifying their identities. We have to create a little bit of friction to increase the cost of corruption. Because my work with Transparency International suggests to me that that is the thing that has had the most impact around the world. Make it harder for the criminals to take the thing or to commit fraud. I used to put a club on my car living in Philadelphia. You can still hack that thing, but it made it harder to take the car. I have a really good bike lock now. You could still get through it if you have the right thing, but it made it harder. We need to make it harder for people who wish us ill to do it. How? I want to make it harder. Well the key, this is what actual innovation, not the buzzword, matters. Make it as easy for someone to comment online as it is to use social media and use backend systems to make sure that you can authenticate them and give them a recourse if their name is used illegally. I think that's reasonable. I'm not in charge, so I just have ideas. Congress has got to fix this. You know what's interesting is that argument, and we have to wrap up some, but in my world, an argument about putting friction because of identity in the context of voting would be unacceptable. We would like voting to be as frictionless. Well you don't have all the obstacles that you're required to rent a scooter. But for states that require ID. In many states, the voter ID is a problem. Right, and we should make sure that anybody who has a problem with the voter ID has as much support as the enforcement to make sure that they can get that part. But you don't want to make it the equivalent of a literacy test. Right. We have a bad history of voting tests. I think we may get to that point where we will live with voter ID and do everything we can to get people IDs, but that's a big, a lot of folks who are concerned about democracy would consider that a problem, and I have mixed feelings about it. But at the same time, I mean, the right to vote exists on a different level than necessarily the right to make a public comment, and certainly different than the right to rent a scooter. If you go to vote.gov, what can you do? Or vote.org. You can register to vote online in the states that have enabled it. Not all Americans do. Which is quite a lot now. Right, but not a bunch of them don't because they're putting a barrier in place. I think voting online is a bad idea. I do think registering to vote is a good idea, and that every state should do it. And there's authentication involved. Why can't we do that for rulemaking? And I'm not saying we have to mandate it. Do some pilots. Let the state's pilot it. Let the cities do it. They're gonna do it anyway because otherwise their efforts to engage the public are gonna be corrupted too. Okay, I'm gonna get more signs telling me it's time to wrap up, but Carmen, do you want the last word? You haven't weighed in in a while. Okay, anybody wanna make a leave for Sandy? I'll just say that sunlight always has been very optimistic in its entire approach and creation. Maybe I'm too much of a trained journalist to be a little skeptical that technology can solve this problem, but may the force be with you. Well, all right. Yeah, may the force be with you. We just did Star Wars Day. I think it's a political problem first and foremost. The technology exists to make this much better, but it's something that Congress has to care about. Well, I think the administration as well. I think future administrations. I think every, as someone said, every administration has an incentive and I don't see the last administration or this administration even acknowledging really the problem, let alone coming up with any solutions. Well, when this information smog is coming from the president, what do you do? I have no comment about that, but I do know there's a- That's our topic for next. We'll do another panel. Thank you very much. Thank you all for coming. Thank you.