> LCX and Lead ID were responsible for many of these fake comments, letters, and petition signatures. Across four advocacy campaigns in 2017 and 2018, LCX fabricated consumer responses used in approximately 900,000 public comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Similarly, in advocacy campaigns between 2017 and 2019, Lead ID fabricated more than half a million consumer responses. These campaigns targeted a variety of government agencies and officials at the federal and state levels.
Wow. Just wow. How can anyone at these companies be avoiding jail time?
This is why, I think, the future is either putting your money (or at least provable identity) where your mouth is, or not being heard (e.g. because everyone will assume a petition without hard proofs of identity fake).
Yes, this is disenfranchising. But not being heard while some company pretends to speak for you is even more disenfranchising.
Maybe this will come off as cynical, but aren't the customers of these 3 companies doing what you suggest here? "Putting their money where their mouth is", and since they have a lot of money their voice gets heard over the ones of individuals with no money. I don't think it's your goal.
So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.
This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.
We don't need an ironclad identity system, we need stronger laws making individuals behind companies like this personally and criminally liable with harsh penalties. That is how scenarios like this can be avoided: destroy the cost/benefit ratio of pursuing it.
Yes, fraud can still happen. But if you fake 100,000 comments eventually you will be discovered and held responsible. What this would reduce is systemic fraud at scale.
> This is why, I think, the future is either putting your money (or at least provable identity) where your mouth is, or not being heard
Oh, I assume this will be run by companies. What is stopping them from impersonating you? Or impersonating you after you're dead? How can we trust these companies not to sell access to identities? Further, why not sell/rent your access to your own identity?
How do you invent a system where the websites instituting the identity proof (KYC/ Know Your Customer) systems don’t just become honeypots for collecting the necessary data to impersonate the millions of people that used it?
Others have commented on your point about money already
Can you even function in modern society without a government issued photo ID? It’s required to drive, collect benefits, fly, purchase alcohol, purchase tobacco, or even purchase Sudafed. I just can’t fathom that there are any actual petitioners or voters that requiring photo ID would disenfranchise.
They hire ad / "lead" companies to collect emails of people who have clicked on an ad, or entered their email saying they support A, B, or C and give them permission to post a comment on their behalf. So in theory each comment has someone who gave the company permission to post a comment for them. BUT if you tell an ad company "hey here is $2 million, get us X number of emails" they're going to produce X emails even if there are not X amount of people. The actual fake profiles come from "publisher" websites that generate fake clicks or leads. Usually the ad or lead companies will have some sort of system to detect fake / spam responses... but $2 million is a decent incentive to maybe loosen their standards a bit.
> emails of people who have clicked on an ad, or entered their email saying they support A, B, or C and give them permission to post a comment on their behalf
Even supposing they did it this way, and people gave their informed consent (fat chance, but for the sake of the hypothetical), that's still fraud. Unless every single comment had a "written and submitted on behalf of X by firm Y" disclaimer, it's still misrepresenting the comments as coming directly from individuals.
Regardless of what fine print unwary consumers agreed to, the agencies being deceived didn't agree to any of it.
Yeah this, setting the price to $100k to guide core laws around $B businesses in a way to override public feedback is cheap. Sounds like it is now officially open season.
This is the most galling aspect of that article - crickets on who paid them to do the deed. The companies named are obviously front company for hire. The clients are telecomms that require FCC licenses to operate. They should get their licenses revoked.
That bit friendly fraud must stay profitable. Otherwise the enemy would do it for half the price! And besides, they just protected their jobs. That reasonable and everybody would have done this!!
"An investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that the fake comments used the identities of millions of consumers, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or consent."
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
> $615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
> But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute.
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
Not really. Vast majority of the crypto money made in 2021-2022 was by swarming ICOs and launchpads with sometimes hundreds of thousands (among people i personally know) and probably millions among those i don't, fake accounts - all having real names, addresses, IPs, passport scans etc. - getting in onto highly deficit launches when like 1 in a 100 trying gets in, and then the coin goes 10x because of immense demand. You do it with 100K accs, 1000 get in and buy coin for $500 each, you get $4m profit spending $500K for buy-ins and another $500K for accounts themselves ($5 apiece). Until even that stopped working because apparently, these fraudsters simply ran out of people worldwide. Some rather ordinary people made north of $100M this way, and i'm sure there are those i don't know (i'm not really in crypto at all, just like hanging out with smart guys) tho made billions. No one went to jail as far as i heard.
It seems the thing to do, before you dump toxic chemicals into the water or whatever, is to open a corporation. "Mistakes were made", after all.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
In the game of prisoners dilemma, they defected and won. This means their strategy of corruption is a winning strategy. It means our law has failed and we can expect more people to practice a strategy of corruption and flouting the law rather than a strategy of adherence to the law or ethical principles.
Breaking the rules and cheating has been a celebrated strategy here and in the startup community. Remember that Uber and AirBnB were blatantly illegal when they launched and made millions. Remember how YC was encouraging people who advertised how to lie to skip covid vaccine wait lines as a "social hack"?
I mean, the rhetoric for net neutrality was pretty extreme. According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass. Only services affiliated with the big greedy telcos were going to be given a pass while all the other services on the web were going to require additional fees to get adequate bandwidth to/from. That was a major fear mongering argument that hasn't come to pass. All the major tech sites were publishing the same rhetoric.
I remember back then, it was abundantly clear that this is what it was. Ajit Pai was against it. He’s a corporate shill. They were doing stuff deliberately to sour the process. Also, like 100% of the fake comments were against net neutrality, which was quite telling. The fake comments weren’t even spread in a believable way. The times look very much bot generated. Simple stuff to filter out if you were honest.
Are you really positing that the NY State AG was colluding across four years of time with the Trump administration's FCC? That's getting a big beyond "jaded" and into tinfoil territory, to be honest.
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
"but it says right here in article 5 paragraph 20 section b of the EULA you agreed to that we may use your personally identifiable information to improve our service."
Such a disheartening outcome. They perpetuated fraud at a scale we've never seen, they get away with it, they changed history, and now we have to live with it.
Right. They need to reopen commentary and unrepeal net neutrality. How is it that we have a system that rewards endless appeals in the judiciary but the equivalent of a mistrial in public policy is treated with a barely-there fine?
Interestingly the actual judgement is significantly higher (still single digit millions). I dont really know what a "Statement of Financial Condition" is but I assume it means they are taking basically all the money these companies + their directors have.
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
Yeah I mean without looking into specifics of what criminal laws would or wouldn’t be applicable, that definitely seems like something the CEO should do a bit of prison time for.
I remember debating with a guy I know about Net Neutrality leading up to this.
He was a sales director at a company that ran network backbone and fiber lines. He was insistent that the Net Neutrality debate was dumb, because it was trying to negate the peering agreements that make the industry run. The way he told it, anyone with a big backbone chooses to invest in peering arrangements with other companies who also make similar arrangements. If you are pushing an undue amount of traffic relative to the other party, you invest more. His take was that Netflix was supporting Net Neutrality so they wouldn't have to invest more in their peering arrangements.
Now - this is a guy who historically is almost always on the wrong side of history. I thought it an interesting talking point, but even now having had some exposure to the peering arrangements between (say) Microsoft and Akamai, I still don't know enough to be able to say whether this is even a valid talking point. I'm very sure this is just something he was told, and repeated ad nauseum.
This seems like the right audience (since I wasn't posting here back then), to ask if there's any legitimacy to this talking point?
There’s something there - Netflix had just moved to a tier 2/3 provider and they weren’t peered well and Netflix was trying to get the big ISPs to peer instead of selling transit - peering for an almost entirely one way connection. The t1s weren’t having it.
The moment Netflix setup caching servers in isp COs around the world they stopped caring about net neutrality. Strange.
Netflix couldn't know what the outcome was going to be, so they hedged by creating a technical solution to the problem. They still pay the ISPs, but for colo services instead of the net neutrality ransom. The problem with paying ransom is it'll just keep going up. Colo services could also keep going up, but it's much more constrained because there's an actual good/service being provided and not just paying money to change a firewall/QoS box rule.
My understanding was that the retail ISP monopolies were refusing Netflix's caching servers unless Netflix agreed to pay 'value'-priced access contracts.
Caching can delay the net neutrality issue by NOT serving the contents from the first party. ISPs peering Netflix won't suffer the heavy traffic (thus no reason to charge tons of money), and ISPs that hosts caches can achieve higher QoS for their customers and also can possibly charge other peers who don't host caches. It's a win-win strategy.
If Netflix wasn't sharing costs in upgrading peering links I agree, but I never understood that to be the point of the debate. Instead it's that ISPs want to rate and charge differently for different providers / content types.
This allows them to try and charge the customer more, but possibly more importantly to charge service providers for access to their customer base. The alternative is that you pay your ISP for X bytes and it doesn't matter what they are or who it's from.
My friend's argument was that the "Meta" i.e. what the debate was really about was about Netflix and others trying to avoid paying their fair share for peering arrangements.
And that the stated reasoning behind the neutrality debate was null and void, because it wasn't what the debate was really about.
Sorta. It's that Netflix didn't want to pay more for something someone else was getting for cheaper. If I sell hot dogs for $3, but charge you $6 because you're you, wouldn't you raise objections?
The problem with your friend's reasoning about peering arrangements is that net neutrality is about getting what you paid for. If I go to the store and buy eggs and the farm decides it hasn't gotten enough money for the eggs, then the next time I go to the store to buy eggs, after I pay the store and get home, the farm sends someone to my house and demands an extra $3 from me (and only me). Something about that just seems off to me.
What if I charge you $6 because you order so many hot dogs that I have to find another distributor of raw hot dogs and hot dog buns? And charging $3 would mean that I'm taking a loss?
Doesn’t seem like a dumb argument to me, although I don’t think net neutrality would have actually interrupted or replaced most of those peering arrangements in practice.
If you’re pushing 15% of all internet traffic you’re going to end up peering, the best I can see net neutrality doing for Netflix is it sets the default payment to $0, giving them a better bargaining position going into any negotiation about peering arrangements, and probably gives them some legal protection against ISPs who might want to throttle Netflix traffic rather than agree to Netflix’s terms.
Internet traffic is not “pushed” onto ISPs. The paying customers of ISPs request data from providers, and they pay those ISPs to receive and deliver that traffic.
Criminal organizations conspiring to subvert democratic processes... The companies should be dissolved, the people who organized it should go to jail, and the broadband companies should be fined millions.
The irony here is that none of that mattered for the purpose of this agreement. They committed fraud by saying they'd subvert the democratic process in one way, but did it in a lazy way instead.
NY is corrupt enough that it might have been intended as both an underhanded victory announcement and as a public quelling measure to make people think justice was done.
Those two things aren't related. This was during a Republican FCC adminstration and Ajit Pai would've repealed net neutrality even if every comment was for it. He doesn't care what public comments say nor does he need to.
That not mattering was then canceled out by another not mattering, because California passed the same rules so they effectively apply to everyone anyway.
It's also about public sentiment towards the companies and their interests. Comcast, for example, as a long history of trying to silence its critics[1][2].
They want to make their critics look like a minority or as if they don't exist at all, especially when much of the criticism is grassroots and organic from actual telecom customers who are often stuck with a monopoly's service.
Just because the outcome would have been the same doesn’t mean we can just allow this to happen with not even a slap on the wrist. This should be serious jail time.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. A majority of the "user content" (product reviews, brand engagement, comments on social media sites, etc) is completely fake, bought for and paid by big money interest aka bots. No different than automated scans of the IPv4 address space: simple, unsophisticated, low-cost and without any repercussion.
I keep getting this eerie feeling when seeing product reviews and the rest of things you list here - I would never in a million year consider writing a paragraph long glowing review of my car jack on amazon, and yet there are millions of such interactions all over the web.
I was startled to recently discover that a local gastroenterologist has numerous excellent reviews on Google Maps by people talking about what a lovely colonoscopy they had, some of whom related the specific medical condition that brought them there. Never in a million years would I consider doing this either. It turns out people are pretty weird.
I've been burned to the tune of thousands of dollars because I took star ratings on Google at face value without looking into the actual reviews to see if they were real or not. I still feel like an idiot because of it.
It's such a double-edged sword anonymity on the internet, but it really is starting to come to be a massive problem where you have no idea whether someone is a person or a bot and now with LLMs, I fear the fake review spam will be next level where it'll be almost impossible to tell real from fake.
More than anything this seems to highlight how naive this approach is for polling public opinion - using an easily gamed internet connected form. Really the whole thing was just a dog and pony show to begin with. The FCC leadership at the time showed absolutely zero intention of being persuaded by the public comments as their minds were already made up beforehand. It was just some kind of hand wavy bs attempt to pretend to perform their due diligence before doing what they were already going to do anyways.
$615 million dollars seems like chump change for 9 million counts of identity fraud. I recently read a story where the local DA in Portland charged a homeless man for identity theft for stealing a wallet. He hadn't tried to represent himself as the other person; he literally just had the wallet and ID.
Yet again, turns out it's OK if you're a corporation.
>Portland charged a homeless man for identity theft
Can you source this? Here's the closest I can find[1], an event in 2017 where a homeless person stole the wallet and wedding ring from a dead man after someone else murdered him.
Readit News
Wow. Just wow. How can anyone at these companies be avoiding jail time?
And who hired them? Is there no money trail?
Yes, this is disenfranchising. But not being heard while some company pretends to speak for you is even more disenfranchising.
So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.
This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.
Yes, fraud can still happen. But if you fake 100,000 comments eventually you will be discovered and held responsible. What this would reduce is systemic fraud at scale.
Oh, I assume this will be run by companies. What is stopping them from impersonating you? Or impersonating you after you're dead? How can we trust these companies not to sell access to identities? Further, why not sell/rent your access to your own identity?
That will become less effective as companies become increasingly centralized, with just a few having many, many brands.
Others have commented on your point about money already
Says a bunch of companies received millions in fines a few years ago and it names AT&T, Charter, Comcast and some lobbying group.
Who would vote for that system?
Even supposing they did it this way, and people gave their informed consent (fat chance, but for the sake of the hypothetical), that's still fraud. Unless every single comment had a "written and submitted on behalf of X by firm Y" disclaimer, it's still misrepresenting the comments as coming directly from individuals.
Regardless of what fine print unwary consumers agreed to, the agencies being deceived didn't agree to any of it.
Deleted Comment
STATE AG used Federal IG investigation to extract money from these crooks.
Why didn't FBI raid these companies?
They raided a ex-Presidents private residence for papers.
Identity Theft x 1 Million counts
This is the most galling aspect of that article - crickets on who paid them to do the deed. The companies named are obviously front company for hire. The clients are telecomms that require FCC licenses to operate. They should get their licenses revoked.
Deleted Comment
$615k seems like a slap on the wrist for what they did.
It is. But its also state and local officials using state law to try to get any punishment for what is a fairly serious federal crime that, for some reason, the federal government has elected not to prosecute. [0]
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
Prosecuting that would have lead to a dangerous precedent for a lot of companies and government agencies involved in propaganda.
This is only trumped by by sovereign immunity, for starting wars or oil spills or releasing viruses or whatever. "Bush is gone, let's move on - why are you still on that?"
State Power is great isn't it?
What if killing net neutrality was a given, but the administration wanted the appearance of due process…
God, I’ve grown jaded.
No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.
Deleted Comment
Then factor time:
1000000000000÷12÷30÷24÷60÷60
Somebody is making $32k profit per second. Who? That's about 5% margin/tax on $615k, so yeah, it's happening per second.
No fine has ever been a threat to any company. The entire system is such a joke.
More consequences are due.
These are not big operations, they were charging 7c a "lead", so each company made ~100k, and the CEO was running the script to send fake data himself.
Justice was served.
Dead Comment
He was a sales director at a company that ran network backbone and fiber lines. He was insistent that the Net Neutrality debate was dumb, because it was trying to negate the peering agreements that make the industry run. The way he told it, anyone with a big backbone chooses to invest in peering arrangements with other companies who also make similar arrangements. If you are pushing an undue amount of traffic relative to the other party, you invest more. His take was that Netflix was supporting Net Neutrality so they wouldn't have to invest more in their peering arrangements.
Now - this is a guy who historically is almost always on the wrong side of history. I thought it an interesting talking point, but even now having had some exposure to the peering arrangements between (say) Microsoft and Akamai, I still don't know enough to be able to say whether this is even a valid talking point. I'm very sure this is just something he was told, and repeated ad nauseum.
This seems like the right audience (since I wasn't posting here back then), to ask if there's any legitimacy to this talking point?
The moment Netflix setup caching servers in isp COs around the world they stopped caring about net neutrality. Strange.
This allows them to try and charge the customer more, but possibly more importantly to charge service providers for access to their customer base. The alternative is that you pay your ISP for X bytes and it doesn't matter what they are or who it's from.
And that the stated reasoning behind the neutrality debate was null and void, because it wasn't what the debate was really about.
The problem with your friend's reasoning about peering arrangements is that net neutrality is about getting what you paid for. If I go to the store and buy eggs and the farm decides it hasn't gotten enough money for the eggs, then the next time I go to the store to buy eggs, after I pay the store and get home, the farm sends someone to my house and demands an extra $3 from me (and only me). Something about that just seems off to me.
Deleted Comment
If you’re pushing 15% of all internet traffic you’re going to end up peering, the best I can see net neutrality doing for Netflix is it sets the default payment to $0, giving them a better bargaining position going into any negotiation about peering arrangements, and probably gives them some legal protection against ISPs who might want to throttle Netflix traffic rather than agree to Netflix’s terms.
Pretty good deal if you ask me
Just call it the cost of doing business hah
That not mattering was then canceled out by another not mattering, because California passed the same rules so they effectively apply to everyone anyway.
They want to make their critics look like a minority or as if they don't exist at all, especially when much of the criticism is grassroots and organic from actual telecom customers who are often stuck with a monopoly's service.
[1] https://www.salon.com/2008/06/09/comcast_2/
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/comcast-accu...
Dead Comment
Legal for a fee. Amazing ROI.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Yet again, turns out it's OK if you're a corporation.
Can you source this? Here's the closest I can find[1], an event in 2017 where a homeless person stole the wallet and wedding ring from a dead man after someone else murdered him.
1: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/06/homeless_man_now...
We can and should improve society.