The FCC chairman likes to say his FCC is going to be super duper transparent. And like the telecom shill he is, the only transparent thing at the FCC is that Ajit Pai is full of shit. When the FCC opened up its fairly hidden comments page to find out what the public thought of their plans to dismantle net neutrality rules put in place under the Obama administration, they were flooded by so many responses that their site went down. Subsequently, the FCC claimed that the site went down not because of heavy response but because they were attacked by an online menace. Since everything going on under this administration is usually a potentially treasonous offense, people began asking questions. For example, why were there tons of bot-driven comments supporting ending net neutrality, and why wouldn’t the FCC take down those fake comments?
Last month, the FCC said they would not comply with a FOIA request to release the logs of the DDoS attack. They made a privacy claim like they were the FBI or the NSA. Now, they’ve responded to Gizmodo’s FOIA request by saying that they didn’t document the attack.
The FCC now tells Gizmodo, however, that it holds no records of such an analysis ever being performed on its public comment system; the agency claims that while its IT staff observed a cyberattack taking place, those observations “did not result in written documentation.”
The FCC released 16 useless pages while withholding over two hundred more, even though they “didn’t document” anything, so those 200+ pages must just be a long list of Ajit Pai’s personal passwords.
The agency cited a variety of justifications in explaining why it was refusing to release 209 pages related to the purported DDoS attack. Some of the records, it said, contain “trade secrets and commercial or financial information” which it deems “privileged or confidential,” citing the Trade Secrets Act. Other documents are withheld in an effort to “prevent injury to the quality of agency decisions,” citing a FOIA exemption that typically protects attorney-client communications but also extends to documents that reflect “advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations” as part of the government’s decision-making processes.
Yup. Ajit Pai and his FCC is pretty transparently a liar.