John Oliver used the power of television Sunday to defend net neutrality, again. The result, like the first time he did it three years ago, was a flood of comments to the FCC's creaky website which then crashed. That happened again this weekend, immediately following Oliver's call to action.
What's different this time is the FCC's response. It's claiming that the site went down because it was targeted by multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
"Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward."
“Oh, yeah?” says the internet community? Show us your work.
As Recode reporter Tony Romm pointed out, this statement raises a lot more questions than it answers. What is the "analysis" that apparently proves the crash came from a coordinated attack, and not from Oliver's segment? How did those performing that "analysis" figure this out? For outside observers, it's tough to say exactly what’s going on: A DDoS and a crash due to an innocent increase in traffic would both likely look fairly similar for the user. What differentiates a website crashing due to genuine traffic from a DDoS attack is that DDoS typically involves a hacker commanding a "botnet"—an army of malware infected devices—to flood a website with traffic, clogging it with requests until it becomes inaccessible to the public.
So Fight for the Future, which Daily Kos is proud to be part of, is demanding proof via this statement released Monday by Campaign Director Evan Greer.
The FCC should immediately release its logs to an independent security analyst or major news outlet to verify exactly what happened last night. The public deserves to know, and the FCC has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website and ensure that every member of the public who wants to submit a comment about net neutrality has the ability to do so. Anything less is a subversion of our democracy.
Daily Kos, along with our intrepid allies in keeping the internet free and open, have created a petition site where we'll collect all of your comments to submit to the FCC, so that you don't have to fight with their constantly crashing website. Sign here, and add your comments, to keep a free an open internet under strong Title II rules.