FCC admits it can’t track fake comments on electronic comment filing system

The Federal Communications Commission admitted in court that its Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) does not track where comments submitted to the system originate. The filing is part of a lawsuit the FCC is facing from The New York Times. The New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed and Gizmodo have been investigating claims about fake/mass-generated comments since 2017, when the FCC began collecting public comments on its proposed repeal of the Title II designation for broadband. The NYT used a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to ask for access to FCC internal logs which should contain each comment and the IP address that it was sent from. The FCC initially refused to comply with the request, arguing that providing NYT with IP addresses would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” and that handing over the internal logs would compromise the security of the ECFS. In court documents filed March 14, the FCC clarified its stance. It admitted that complying with the request would be incredibly difficult and possibly impossible. “The retracing process would allow the FCC to identify several requests made close in time to the second the comment appears in the database, and guess which one is the actual originating request,” it said. “However, the FCC cannot directly and conclusively correlate one ECFS request with one ECFS comment.”