On Sunday, May 8, after John Oliver directed net neutrality supporters to flood FCC’s rickety old website with comments, the site went down. At the time, the FCC blamed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Super dubious timing, right? Many people have been demanding the evidence of these attacks and for good reason—we should know a) if these attacks actually happened, and b) if they did happen, was their purpose to stop public comment? According to ZDNet, the FCC has no interest in releasing such information to the public.
In a ZDNet interview, FCC chief information officer David Bray said that the agency would not release the logs, in part because the logs contain private information, such as IP addresses. In unprinted remarks, he said that the logs amounted to about 1 gigabyte per hour during the alleged attack.
From the interview, Bray said that FCC staff noticed a high volume of incoming comments in the early morning of May 8, hours after the John Oliver show aired. The log files showed that non-human bots submitted a flood of comments using the FCC's API. The bot that submitted these comments sparked the massive uptick in internet traffic on the FCC by using the public API as a vehicle.
The FCC’s Republican chairman Ajit Pai has touted “transparency” while methodically chipping away at net neutrality and services that were put in to bridge the digital divide (the growing inequality between the haves and have-nots in access to the digital sphere). Transparency to chairman Pai means telling you he will listen and be upfront about what he is doing and why, while not listening at all and withholding important information until he decides to do something. The FCC’s decision to not be transparent in this case leaves open a lot of pretty damning semi-rhetorical questions, like who flooded the FCC’s site with a bot-like anti-net neutrality message that night?
It's still not known who was behind the flood of comments that derailed the FCC's commenting system, though it's understood that the text used in each of the hundreds of thousands of spam comments was drawn from the Center for Individual Freedom, a conservative anti-net neutrality lobby group. (The lobby group's president, Jeff Mazzella, denied that his organization was using bots "in any way, shape or form.").
Probably Hillary Clinton.