FCC Admits It Lied About the DDoS Attack During Net Neutrality Comment Process
https://wccftech.com/fcc-admits-lied-ddos-ajit-pai-obama
During the time the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was taking public comments ahead of the rollback of net neutrality rules, the agency had claimed its comments system was knocked offline by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
These attacks were used to question the credibility of the comment process, where millions of Americans had voiced against the net neutrality rollback. The Commission then chose to ignore the public comments altogether.
FCC now admits it's been lying about these attacks all this time
No one bought the FCC's claims that its comment system was targeted by hackers during the net neutrality comment process. Investigators have today validated those suspicions revealing that there is no evidence to support the claims of DDoS attacks in 2017. Following the investigation that was carried out after lawmakers and journalists pushed the agency to share the evidence of these attacks, the FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has today released a statement, admitting that there was no DDoS attack.
This statement would have been surprising coming from Pai – an ex-Verizon employee who has continued to disregard public comments, stonewall journalists' requests for data, and ignore lawmakers’ questions – if he hadn't thrown the CIO under the bus, taking no responsibility whatsoever for the lies. In his statement, Pai blamed the former CIO and the Obama administration for providing "inaccurate information about this incident to me, my office, Congress, and the American people".
He went on to say that the CIO's subordinates were scared of disagreeing with him and never approached Pai. If all of that is indeed true, the Chairman hasn't clarified why he wouldn't demand to see the evidence despite everyone out of the agency already believing that the DDoS claim was nothing but a lie to invalidate the comment process.
Sources: Wccftech, Gizmodo, CSO Online, Newsweek