>The investigation focuses on a specific anti-NN comment that was submitted, identically worded, hundreds of thousands of times, in alphabetical order by name.
No, it's focusing on many different comments, including some from pro-NN groups and some from anti-NN groups. 14 groups in total were subpoenaed.
The WSJ article linked (can read it at http://archive.is/sp9Q7) says 4,622 people polled said they hadn't left a particular comment that was pro-NN, which is the majority of the 7,741 total responses that claimed they didn't leave the comment that bears their name.
>If you're suggesting that CQ was just the unwitting middleman between the FCC and some other group that was submitting the fraudulent comments through their site, that would have been trivially detectable and filtered out by CQ:
It's trivial for any teen on 4chan to defeat those measures, come on. Pretty much everything that's out there could in theory have been done by a single 14-year old for laughs. Connect to websites that are collecting names without extensive validation, use a few IPs, etc.
What's more likely - that 14 different groups, some on the pro-NN side and some on the anti-side, all chose to commit crimes by faking names and addresses, or that one bad actor connected to a few of them to troll?
I find it interesting that you keep referring to "the WSJ article linked" -- which now that you've actually linked to it turns out to be a 2017 article that as far as I can tell you're the only one who's linking to -- rather than the current article on Gizmodo we're actually discussing here, which describes an investigation that is in fact focused on the specific anti-NN comment submitted by (or through) CQ.
Even that WSJ article focuses largely on that specific blatant example, and notes that the several anti-NN statements they examined were "63%, 72% and 80% bogus comments" (the single pro-NN statement they examined "was 32% bogus.")
Astroturf exists and is a problem on all sides, yes, but this specific instance is far beyond the pale. Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation.
> It's trivial for any teen on 4chan to defeat those measures
That's... debatable. But also beside the point. CQ claims they vetted their submissions for "questionable submissions". If that vetting failed to notice that an identical comment was submitted through them that many times, with names in alphabetical order, then they either are lying about vetting their submissions for accuracy, or they are themselves the ones committing the fraud.
OP is narrowly focused on a particular one out of fourteen companies under investigation for unclear reasons. They don't say whether they've tried similar analysis of any of the other form comments. If I had to make a wild guess, I'd say they expect more clicks here than with a more in depth investigation of everyone involved, for reasons left as an exercise to the reader.
>Astroturf exists and is a problem on all sides, yes, but this specific instance is far beyond the pale. Which is presumably why it merits this year-long investigation.
14 organizations are under investigation, not just one.
>But also beside the point. CQ claims they vetted their submissions for "questionable submissions".
And also gives a few examples, all of which are trivial to bypass, and all of which are automated, so it's not clear why you'd think they are manually looking at any of these before submitting unless it fails the automated tests.
>It's not clear why you'd think 818,000 (per WSJ) identical comments submitted in alphabetical order should pass automated tests?
There's no reason to think they were submitted originally in alphabetical order. The most likely possibility here is that CQ sorted them before submitting to the FCC.
It occurs to me that it's entirely possible CQ would sort the comments by alphabetical order of the commenter before submitting them in bulk, still not sure where it's from but that seems a likely explanation.
(Also, FWIW I personally witnessed it while trying to submit my own comment on the issue; the viewable posted comments were about 98% duplicates of that one "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet" etc, and the names were somewhere in the E's.)
And do you have any reason to think they were submitted to CQ in alphabetical order, as opposed to the obvious possibility that CQ or their client sorted them prior to submission to the FCC?
Those timestamps are the time the FCC received them. If you read through the email chain you'll see they had many comments ready (the email says he was expecting to send over 250k comments/day) prior to submitting any or getting the API access set up.
This wasn't real-time submission, and this should be clear from OP.
If you read through the email chain you'll see that it occurred before the docket even was made public to be commented on: "The docket will be on internet privacy, it is not yet published. We believe it will be published later this month"; if they already had prewritten comments ready at that time, that confirms fraud by CQ, because the public can't write comments on something that doesn't yet exist.
Meanwhile CQ is repeatedly insistent that the submissions be recorded individually, and not by the bulk csv method; and when the API limits turn out to be too strict they go to great effort to do it anyway: "We will need to set up multiple servers to feed the API simultaneously to meet the delivery needs of our clients" -- 114 api keys compared to one or two for most other groups.
None of which sits well with your idea that they'd intentionally sort them first. Bulk submissions might be expected to be sorted. The assumption for individually submitted comments is that they're individually submitted; it exposes the astroturfiness very clearly when all the identical comments show up in strict order in the docket. (Or at the very least, if this was just a dumb goofup or excessive tidiness, why wouldn't they have simply explained that as the obvious excuse the moment it started being reported? There'd be plenty of supporting evidence, the stage space alone would have had to have been significant)
No, it's focusing on many different comments, including some from pro-NN groups and some from anti-NN groups. 14 groups in total were subpoenaed.
The WSJ article linked (can read it at http://archive.is/sp9Q7) says 4,622 people polled said they hadn't left a particular comment that was pro-NN, which is the majority of the 7,741 total responses that claimed they didn't leave the comment that bears their name.
>If you're suggesting that CQ was just the unwitting middleman between the FCC and some other group that was submitting the fraudulent comments through their site, that would have been trivially detectable and filtered out by CQ:
It's trivial for any teen on 4chan to defeat those measures, come on. Pretty much everything that's out there could in theory have been done by a single 14-year old for laughs. Connect to websites that are collecting names without extensive validation, use a few IPs, etc.
What's more likely - that 14 different groups, some on the pro-NN side and some on the anti-side, all chose to commit crimes by faking names and addresses, or that one bad actor connected to a few of them to troll?