'Oversight' Hearing Fails Utterly To Hold FCC Accountable For Lying To Congress About Fake DDOS Attack

from the ill-communication dept

FCC "oversight" hearings continue to be comically lacking in the actual oversight department. As we noted previously, today was Congress' opportunity to hold the FCC and agency head Ajit Pai accountable for making up a DDOS attack and then lying (repeatedly) about it to the press, FBI investigators, and Congress. As we've previously stated, both e-mails obtained via FOIA and an FCC Inspector General report (pdf) found that the FCC bizarrely made up a DDOS attack to try and explain away the fact that John Oliver viewers pissed about the net neutrality repeal crashed the FCC comment system.

The IG's report and internal e-mails clearly illustrate that not only did FCC CIO make up a DDOS, but several FCC staffers then misled Congress repeatedly about the total lack of evidence supporting that claim. The false statements were bad enough to warrant them being forwarded to the DOJ, which refused to prosecute anyone. But the e-mails also highlight how the FCC's press office repeatedly misled numerous press outlets, and even went so far as to issue statements denigrating reporters like Gizmodo's Dell Cameron for being "irresponsible" as they slowly uncovered the fake claims.

In a functional democracy, this is the sort of thing that would be covered extensively at a hearing purportedly designed specifically to hold the FCC accountable to Congress and the public. In said fictional healthy democracy, Congress might even, you know, actually do something about it.

But today's hearing was little more than a joke, rife with lots of giggling, football references, and numerous softball questions -- but few if any hard inquiries about the DDOS attack that wasn't. The closest thing Pai experienced to actually being pressured came from Senator Brian Schatz. But when pressed as to what he knew and when, Pai again threw his employees under the bus, denying that he had any knowledge of or role in the FCC's efforts to mislead Congress and public. The exchange is here for those interested:

Exchange between Sen. @brianschatz & @AjitPaiFCC over a previous claim by the @FCC that the agency was the victim of a cyberattack (DDoS). Full video here: https://t.co/5DYkNA3Lr5 pic.twitter.com/Hxxj7MHRO2 — CSPAN (@cspan) August 16, 2018

In the exchange, Pai said he suspected there was no foul play from the beginning and that the "DDOS" was just the John Oliver effect. When pressed as to why Pai didn't do more to correct the false claims earlier, Pai said he "wanted you to get this information sooner" but remained quiet at the behest of the FCC IG (which has yet to respond to press inquiry). "I made the judgment that we had to adhere to the [IG's] request," claimed Pai, "even though I knew we would be falsely attacked for having done something inappropriate,” Pai said. “The story in this report vindicated my position."

Except the IG's report doesn't vindicate Pai's position, and somebody at the hearing should have pointed that out. In fact, the IG's report shows that it wasn't just the FCC CIO that had been making false DDOS claims for the better part of the last year. There's ample evidence, had anybody on the oversight committee actually wanted to press the issue, that numerous FCC employees repeatedly and intentionally doubled down on claims Pai now claims he knew weren't true.

For example, the IG report found that at least three staffers provided false statements to not only Congress, but also to FBI investigators trying to determine the scope of the alleged attack. And throughout the inquiry Pai's press shop issued statements attacking press outlets for being "irresponsible" simply for reporting the fact there was no evidence or "analysis" to support the FCC's allegation:

"The FCC has never stated that it lacks any documentation of this DDoS attack itself," the agency states. "And news reports claiming that the Commission has said this are without any basis and completely irresponsible. In fact, we have voluminous documentation of this attack in the form of logs collected by our commercial cloud partners."

But none of that was true. There was no DDOS attack and there was no evidence, "voluminous" or otherwise. Again, there's every indication that the FCC doubled down on the fake DDOS claim because it wanted to downplay media reports showing that millions of Americans were pissed about the death of net neutrality (it wasn't public outrage, we were attacked!). It's the same reason why the FCC refused to do anything about the bogus comments that plagued the repeal's net neutrality comment period: it wanted to push the Trumpian narrative that the massive public anger over the attack net neutrality wasn't real.

The fact that Pai's press shop was actively spreading false statements and maligning reporters makes it pretty obvious that Pai actively participated in or was at least aware of the FCC's head fake. But at no point during the "oversight" hearing was this avenue of inquiry pursued. Instead, users who tuned in for a reckoning got to enjoy Ted Cruz once again misrepresenting what net neutrality was, and gushing missives from telecom-sector allies like Senator John Thune on Pai's (artificial) love and adoration of neglected rural broadband markets.

Aside from the fake DDOS attack, the hearing was yet another missed opportunity to seriously hold the FCC to account on a number of issues, including making up data and ignoring the public in the rush to repeal net neutrality, gutting funding for rural broadband, eroding consumer privacy protections, killing efforts to improve cable box competition, propping up predatory prison telco monopolies and every other little anti-consumer, pet project Ajit Pai has embraced as leader of the agency. But instead of "oversight," users that tuned in this morning got something that looked much more like a bipartisan game of patty cake.

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Filed Under: ajit pai, brian shatz, david bray, ddos, fcc, john oliver, lies, oversight, senate, ted cruz