> Second, the FCC objects to producing the relevant materials from the API proxy server log because to do so requires creating a script, which demands "research" rather than simply a "search."
Funny how a government agency considers it overly burdensome to write what is likely a 4 line script, so goes through a lawsuit that costs taxpayers likely millions of dollars to avoid it. Unless their infrastructure is well and truly F*ed, this is a 30-60 minute task for a junior server admin. Most likely they already ran it and didn't like what it revealed so it's even less effort.
Don't underestimate the absolutely jaw-dropping incompetence from even senior "tech" folks employed by governments.
Within the last couple years, I've overheard senior, so-called technical government employees 1) complain about Git and wonder aloud why we weren't using Visual Source Safe; 2) insist that rotating through a list of 12 hard-coded passwords, in code, checked into Git, was totally fine; 3) refuse to believe that automated deployments were possible (not hard, or against norms, but physically impossible); 4) try to explain to another so-called technical gov't employee the difference between CSS and JavaScript, and get it wrong; 5) stand up in the middle of a conversation and walk out the door because it's 2:30 PM and their day is over; 6) even more nonsense you wouldn't believe if I showed you a video of it.
I would hope Federal is a little better than State, but I'm not convinced.
I worked with Federal briefly. I was at a startup at the time, and we had this integration with the Dept. Homeland Security. I was young and stoked. I was the one who was going to wire everything together. It seemed really big and important. I thought it'd be a gold star on my resume.
Reality was super disappointing. So much "we're working on a document for when we can give a date for a date on another document" kind of bureaucracy. I'm sure down in the deep cores of these agencies there are super bright and talented people. The ones at the edges, though.. the problem seems to be that you have to be more of a politician than an engineer to actually get anything done.
>seems to be that you have to be more of a politician than an engineer to actually get anything done.
In Red Mars, they try to colonize Mars. At first, the challenges are completely technical, and the engineers prevail. But the success is chased by increasing bureaucracy and involvement of stakeholders, and it quickly becomes all politics. c:
If you work for a modern software company (not a service company that sells software), and you honestly suggest Visual Source Safe, you'll get fired. There's just no reasonably intelligent reason to suggest it.
You practically have to assault someone in the break room to get fired from a government job.
But if your org is using $oldtech and some new person comes in recommending $newtech, you'll be in great company if you argue that $newtech sucks and you wish you could just keep using $oldtech.
Organizational inertia is definitely a thing, and technology trends do not move as quickly in all sectors.
But how good is $newtech really? Is it someone trying to screw over other older employees in the name of his job security? Is Mr. $newtech in touch with the salespeople hawking this product? Is he being incentivized to advocate for it? How many secondary changes will $newtech result in, and will they deliver so much more value as to justify the expense, inconvenience, retraining, and tears that will come from replacing $oldtech?
My guess is, in most circumstances, probably not
"New tech" lately feels more and more like whatever the next breed of inexperienced geeks decided to reinvent
I worked for a startup with ex-Microsoft management in the 1990s, so we used VSS. All joking aside, we actually did lose about a day's work to that pile of fun.
I'm told that at this point sales will quietly try to talk you out of buying it.
> 5) stand up in the middle of a conversation and walk out the door because it's 2:30 PM and their day is over;
My dad would do the same stuff. He worked at Samsung. When he got into his 50s, it was like a switch turned on and he just wouldn't stay beyond a standard work day. Got a meeting you scheduled late in the day? Too bad, he was there at 6am and was going home. He was always home at the same time.
In comparison, during this period of time my mom would go into the office at 8am and stay as late as 1am. She would even pick up 2nd dinner for me on her way home.
There's a difference between saying "I saw you scheduled a meeting for 2-3, just so you know my day is over at 2:30, can we reschedule?" (which I have done, and will always do), and cutting someone off mid-sentence to say your day is over because your clock beeped, and being out the door and in your car 15 seconds later.
Sure, but the latter is completely resonable when the person scheduling the meeting is a pointer-haired twit who would respond to the former with "sure, sure, sounds good" <later> "okay, we rescheduled for 2:00-3:00", which from what I've seen/heard seems to be typical of government work.
Some people that work early-shifted days do so because they have child care obligations. Many day cares charge by the minute for late pick-ups. So an abrupt departure may not be 100% attributable to laziness. Failure to communicate those constrains ahead of the meeting very well might be.
On the flip side, does your employer care if you clock out at 2:25 because you're bored? I bet some employers (like large bureaucracies) don't like that. We lack context.
I've seen worse in private companies. For example I once did some consulting for a company that manages an industrial production line using software written by a single "rock star" programmer leading a team of imbeciles. Dude is adamantly opposed to version control and his "process" for deploying new code to production hardware is to manually rename the active version to .BAK and copy over the new one. He keeps track of versions by remembering which computer has which version installed. This is in a company where if the line goes down, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour till it comes back up.
>Don't underestimate the absolutely jaw-dropping incompetence from even senior "tech" folks employed by governments.
When I was in training with the RCAF, I was in lecture where the Information Systems Security Officer (i.e. the senior most infosec person at this base of 6-8000 people) told us about a time where "two guys were emailing back and forth and just picked up a virus".
I made the mistake of pointing out that that's not really how computers work, i.e. an email can't just pick up a virus in transit like a dog picks up a tick.
This reminds me of when I worked on a public policy project for a biotech company. Our product didn't fit in the current Medicare policies, so we decided to approach Medicare and suggest a solution.
Medicare spent months just digging into the laws and talking to their lawyers just to prove they actually had the jurisdiction to change the policy. That really blew me away. One of their bigger concerns was "this might not be our job".
CMS, as a regulatory agency, does have a high priority in making sure it’s got the legal right to make regulations pertaining to a thing. Because otherwise those regs are illegal, which causes lawsuits and chaos.
You make it sound like they spent months trying to finagle a way out of working.
> Don't underestimate the absolutely jaw-dropping incompetence from even senior "tech" folks employed by governments.
100% agree. Except each agency can significantly change on this. Some agencies (DEA, USCIS) can and are completely competent. I've seen then turn around on certain moderately complex tasks within hours.
Then you have the idiots at HISN and VA that takes a year for even basic one-way integration. Or, they will argue with you how SAML works (or doesnt) for weeks at a time.
> 1) complain about Git and wonder aloud why we weren't using Visual Source Safe;
Ah so you were talking with their developers. Sounds DoD'ish as that's what they use, along with Firebird.
> 2) insist that rotating through a list of 12 hard-coded passwords, in code, checked into Git, was totally fine;
Ive dealt with network infrastructure entities that did similar for the commercial side of things. I wish it were the "OMG" exception. There's more terrible out there than this, admittedly.
> 3) refuse to believe that automated deployments were possible (not hard, or against norms, but physically impossible);
Well, they ARE impossible by policy. FedRAMP and FISMA requires manual and intentional deployments. Of course we all know that this is the norm for a software SaaS company - but its not the norm when you have to go through a VPN with a CAC or PIV card, and then another VPN to either the testnet or prodnet... And the only software support for both are Windows. (And the VPNs will also kick you out if you're not running windows.)
> 4) try to explain to another so-called technical gov't employee the difference between CSS and JavaScript, and get it wrong;
I've had screaming fights break out in calls when technical issues came up like this. And usually its the single real employee screaming at the legions of 3rd party contractors. And also, Snowden was correct in that 95% of the "government employees" aren't. They are contractors working for Accenture or the host of other Gino (govt in name only) employees. They don't get govt benefits, nor do they have whistleblower protections. Snowden in Hawaii was such a 3rd party govt employee.
I have only ran across 1 fed employee (contractor or real) that was in any way and shape competent.
> 5) stand up in the middle of a conversation and walk out the door because it's 2:30 PM and their day is over;
I get your point. But it's usually 4p. Ive also seen government employees (employed by the local/state/fed) get in trouble for working non-critical issues outside their hours.
> 6) even more nonsense you wouldn't believe if I showed you a video of it.
One thing I've learned is that there is almost always a reason (and a decent one too) of why there is a rule. It's because someone previously abused something, or did something that broke stuff, and the new rule is the usual overcompensation so that anybody in power can claim "They didnt follow our rules, which protect against that." And remember, it's not far up the foodchain to an elected official.
But yeah, there's absolutely crazy shit out there, especially in the fed side of things. And much of it is for complete show. One such tempest in a teacup issue is the new (as of 2017) NIST password guidelines: not a single fed has implemented them. They still enforce the old and terrible ruleset.
Totally made up answer ahead, but based on lived experience in a different country.
It probably happened like this: In 1995 people started planning for this Y2K bug. Some developer said "Nah it's not an issue I'll just change this field" so they changed it like they change everything else, and then 6 months later people got paid the wrong amount because a date calculation was wrong.
So they went looking for someone to blame. They fire the developer of course, but they want someone responsible, who signed off on the release. There was no one, so and with the biggest software fixing exercise in their history coming up they figured they should make sure this problem didn't happen again.
So they introduced sign-off procedures, where someone above a certain level had to sign off on things.
And that is how manual deployments are "banned". They probably aren't exactly, but some poor person will have to put their job on the line to sign off on automating them.
'sign off' procedures, and 'automated deployments' are not different ends of the spectrum.
Nobody who gives a shit about their product/service is deploying from a developer directly into production without any kind of, you know, code review, pipeline testing, etc.
It's 'automated' in that you git push. The pipeline handles code reviews, sign-offs, etc., and then automatically deploys the approved code change.
This isn't banned at all.
Just randomly pushing shit to production is banned (separation of concerns, amongst other controls). You can still have everything be fully automated, just not fully autonomous. Someone reviewing a change and then clicking 'LGTM' is still an automated, continuously integrated and deployed system.
Because someone, somewhere, sometime years/decades ago, auto-deployed buggy/incomplete code to production, and it destroyed something important, and the 'solution' they came up with was "all deployments must be conducted manually by team lead^W^Wan approved engineer^W^W^Wsome random shmuck".
> Don't underestimate the absolutely jaw-dropping incompetence from even senior "tech" folks employed by governments.
How do we replace them with folks that know what they're doing? It almost sounds like it would be better for the government to outsource to a tech firm.
These people have huge salaries and pensions, too, right?
You let government fire incompetent people, which is very hard to do with unions like AFSCME in place, in part because "incompetent" in this context is extremely subjective. I'm not saying unions are bad but they do make it objectively harder to fire these borderline folks.
Huge salaries? No. The agencies I contracted for topped out for senior folks in the $85-90k range while the same title in the private sector is going to be about 40-50% higher than that. They have pensions but unless you're already 15 years in you really need to work the system to get anything out of it. New hires (rightly) have to put a lot of money into the system so it's not much better than a private retirement plan in terms of returns, however it is guaranteed by the taxpayers.
There are exceptions, though. If you're retiring from any of the agencies I contracted for, and you worked there your entire career, you're probably getting a lump sum $80-100k vacation time payout and anywhere from $60-100k/yr for the rest of your life depending on your exact job. This is in addition to whatever personal retirement accounts you might have. Obviously no 401(k) with the pension in place, but it was not unheard to have some of the higher ups cashing in just enough vacation every year to fully fund their Roth.
So yeah you can set up a nice retirement nest egg if you're willing to commit to the state (at least where I live). But for short term stuff it's terrible. You don't even vest any pension benefits until I think 5 years now, and then you're getting something like 5-10% from age 70 on or something.
Based on my observations, too much vacation to take.
State employees with 25 years get 54 days of leave a year[1] and 10 federal holidays. Additionally many agencies work 9 hour days, adding every other friday off, for an extra 26 days. All told, that is 90 days off a year, or more than 1 in 3 work days.
I wanted to correct myself, the vacation and annual leave I linked to are not additive. Annual leave is the greater of the two and 30 days opposed to 54. This would be a total of 66 vacation days.
Just to clarify #5 - the hour difference here is suspicious, were you working with an EST person from the west coast? If so scheduling a meeting that overruns 5:30 PM is a pretty unfortunate arrangement.
The FOIA request was probably not denied because the FCC lacks the technical abilities to fulfill the request. In my experience it's likely that no technical people were consulted on it. A FOIA office simply looks for any excuse they can use to deny a request if they want to deny it. The reason doesn't need to make sense or be their true reason.
Here's an example from my own experience:
I can recall a FOIA request I made for the results of searches in an internal government database in spreadsheet format. To my knowledge this can be exported using existing functionality in the web interface for the internal database. The request was denied, and I appealed. They claimed that the information was publicly available, which is absurd. In the appeal I showed that actually almost none of what I wanted was publicly available and the independent appeals office agreed (after a long delay). Then it became clear that the FOIA office thought the request would be burdensome and they tried to deny it on those grounds. I insisted that no, it wouldn't be burdensome.
When it finally went to the person who would actually do the work, apparently it took only a few hours to do, and they declined to charge me anything for it. I assume the majority of that time was writing some useful comments in the headers of the spreadsheets. They didn't need to write the comments, so clearly they weren't pressed for time.
In the end, the FOIA office spent far more time trying to deny this request than it would have taken to fulfill it.
> A FOIA office simply looks for any excuse they can use to deny a request if they want to deny it. The reason doesn't need to make sense or be their true reason.
That's exactly what I was hinting at here. The agency has no interest in the public finding out how much of that feedback was bullshit.
> In my experience it's likely that no technical people were consulted on it.
From the sounds of it, they did at some point consult someone technical and tried to parse their answer as part of their justification for not executing the FOIA request. The fact that they knew it would take a script to extract the data as opposed to just dropping it into a search tool suggests as much anyhow. Though more likely it would just be a couple `sed` commands, a perl/ Python script, or a few command line tools.
Once upon a time, my company lawyers came to me and asked me if we had certain historical data that I could pull from a database and how long it would take to pull it. It only took me an hour or so, so I just pulled the data, stuck it in an excel file and sent it to them. They were not happy. Apparently they had already told the judge that the data was unduly burdensome to pull and would take too long.
They are arguing that finding data that's in log files is creating new data (because they have to write a script to parse it) which is specious. Logs are designed to be parsed and searched. You might as well claim that running an SQL script to query data is creating new information.
That is true but more likely they try to push back against every request that isn't simply zip up files or documents and deposit them.
They are using the "defense" that it may be difficult to do, but their aim (avoiding the more sinister possibilities) is to stop precedent for other unwieldy requests.
In my experience, government agencies fulfill requests if it's easy and won't put the agency or administration in a bad light. I suspect this falls more into the latter case than the former, they don't want people to see the logs because they know the bulk of the comments are bogus.
You’ve never dealt with a bad log setup. Things I’ve seen:
- inconsistent format depending on which part of the software was logging (think of some modules using logging lib and others using print())
- multiline logs without any indication they are multiline
- logs in some dumb binary format that requires the original software to reverse into legible text
There are more, but the point is that logs are not often designed to be parsed and searched. They are normally added by developers to be human readable means of reversing internal state to debug issues. Anything above that is (shockingly) bonus material that doesn’t make it into home-grown enterprise/govt software.
> You’ve never dealt with a bad log setup. Things I’ve seen:
I'm not sure how this is relevant. I've seen miles of incompetence in my career, that someone can fudge something up royally doesn't change the fundamental purpose of the thing. The point of log files is to store and make retrievable data about server state and actions over time. That someone somewhere can screw that up doesn't change that.
In this particular case, I find it unlikely they rolled some custom bizarro log file format regardless because of the nature of the subject matter: Proxy server log files. It's unlikely they rolled their own proxy server (and they certainly don't imply any particular difficulties like that in court statements) so we're most likely talking about reading standard Apache logs or something similar.
That’s a point of log files. However, it’s not the point tons of developers have in mind when they add log statements. Developers are primarily concerned with state required to reproduce bugs, not long term standardized storage containing enough information for useful attribution or even all important state transitions. You would be surprised how many developers don’t even bother logging item deletions because it’s such a trivial code path.
You’re idea of “the fundamental purpose” is from an operators view. It rarely lines up with the developers’ views and you’re in for a bad time if you think people who don’t see your perspective are “fudging something up royally” with “miles of incompetence”.
Well, if we’re following that logic, then anytime data is moved from a disk to ram, we’re “creating new data.” Well, yes, it wasn’t there before, so it’s “new data,” but it’s also a copy of old data.
That's actually a fairly interesting case. I haven't read into it too much but it seems that they agree that it isn't necessarily a copyright violation based on who does it. It looks like what they got Peak on was instead the fact that they had unlicensed copies of MAI software at their HQ and were loaning MAI equipment in such a way that violated the license agreements.
P.S. Please correct me if I got any of this wrong.
There are some details in the case that are as you say, about Peak having "unclean hands" in effect, but they're fairly beside the point for the case's broader significance.
What it really stands/stood for is the notion that a "copy" sufficient for the operation of copyright law occurs when a program is loaded from disk to RAM, and therefore it's possible to infringe copyright merely by using software that you aren't personally licensed for.
MAI basically used this theory to make third-party maintenance of their systems illegal, so Congress responded by amending the Copyright Act, but in an extremely narrow way: there's a carve out specifically for maintenance and repair.
They have the information (note that they did not contest that point), the script would presumably allow them to surface that information more quickly.
Technically you can open that logfile in Notepad and Ctrl+F the thing. If I was the judge and you pulled that argument someone at your agency would now be using that method instead of "researching" a grep query.
And when the Government is on the other side with requests, warrants, and subpoenas, they aggressively push with little regard to cost, complexity, or even feasibility.
If we replied to a lawful order with "This demands 'research' instead of simply a 'search'," they would tell us tough-shit.
I fully understand both the cases for and against having net neutrality rules. However, I cannot for the life of me understand why a bunch of comments on a website has somehow become the battleground where this is being fought. What is going on here? As far as I can tell, the comments have about as much sway on public policy as the average youtube comment – none whatsoever.
Because those are not youtube comments. Whenever FCC makes a policy change there is a period when citizens can comment on it and express their opinions and concern. To faithfully execute FCC supposed to include these comments in decision, they still could go against it, but they need to address the concerns raised there.
The false comments, basically gave them opportunity to claim that citizens were equally divided and they could just ignore them, when in reality people were overwhelmingly against the changes.
The whole FCC change reminds me of ICANN and .org TLD. Overwhelmingly unpopular to the public but driven by special interests.
> Overwhelmingly unpopular to the public but driven by special interests.
I'd suggest this describes most lobbying. When something's overwhelmingly popular to the public, no one has to get paid to make that clear to the powers-that-be.
I don't think it's true to say that the comments to the FCC have no impact. It's a part of their process for a reason, and the fact that somoene felt the need to stuff the ballot points to genuine concern. I think it's fairly reasonable to say it would have put Pai in a difficult position politically to institute a rule after 100% of people petitioned against it. Which is why the clearly fraudulent activity happened.
I think the reason the case is being fought is the same reason, it's not about whether people actually like net neutrality, they clearly don't. The point is to rules lawyer through the situation - oh well the comments were a wash, oh well there seems to have been fraud, let's ignore the comments entirely, oh well we can actually really easily tell which comments were fraudulent, but the rules have been in place for years now so it's a moot point.
> No one wants ISP (or in fact anyone) deciding what sites they can visit or not.
A lot of people do want that because they view prohibiting it as a government take over of the internet. I personally think that is absurd, but it's a very popular opinion.
> A lot of people do want that because they view prohibiting it as a government take over of the internet. I personally think that is absurd, but it's a very popular opinion.
Can you point to some places where this opinion is expressed? I've never encountered it.
But not just here, I've seen this opinion represented pretty much anywhere I see net neutrality discussed. Anecdotally, it's nowhere near a majority opinion, but it's definitely not an uncommon one.
I don't see anyone in the links you provided saying they want ISPs to decide what sites they can visit or not. I only see them saying that they believe government regulation of the Internet in the name of net neutrality would be worse than having to bargain with ISPs about access to content as private entities bargaining with other private entities.
I happen to think they are wrong as a matter of tactics in this particular case: governments gave ISPs the special privileges they have now, and if we can't get governments to just withdraw those privileges altogether and force ISPs to compete on a level playing field, net neutrality regulation might be the "least worst" alternative we can actually achieve.
But as far as being skeptical of government regulation in general, and government regulation of any form of mass communication in particular, as a longer term strategic position I think they are right. Net neutrality regulation, even if we could get it, would not allow us to just sit back and relax, problem solved. We would still have to be prepared to protest the next time the government tries to overreach, and the next, and the next, and the next...
> I don't see anyone in the links you provided saying they want ISPs to decide what sites they can visit or not. I only see them saying that they believe government regulation of the Internet in the name of net neutrality would be worse than having to bargain with ISPs about access to content as private entities bargaining with other private entities.
A distinction without a practical difference. They do want ISPs to decide what sites they can and cannot visit because that is the defacto state of affairs in a world without net neutrality, it is only that they are satisfied with the decisions the ISPs have made thus far.
They are misinformed, the ISPs spent a lot of effort trying to confuse people. They confuse people implying that government tries to start controlling Internet now and it didn't do that before, when the reverse is true.
Is like trying to convince people that first amendment should be abolished, because it is enforced by the government and they should not control what we can say or not. It is flipping the whole thing upside down, and many confused people are supporting it, when they really want the opposite.
I don't agree that they are confused, at least not most of them. Rather, those views comport with their existing perspectives on government regulation of the private sector. Even in this very forum it is not uncommon to see people seriously argue that regulations are fundamentally bad for consumers, including net neutrality. I disagree with this perspective, but I don't think it's accurate to say they are confused about their position.
The most common argument I hear against net neutrality is that it's unnecessary government overreach and that ISPs would never try to dictate network traffic in a draconian fashion because it would be bad for business. I won't list all the problems with this reasoning since I'd be preaching to the choir, but this is a belief that a lot of people have.
> I disagree with you here, those who are informed are are for net neutrality, not against it.
I know a software engineer who is very much against net neutrality. He also happens to be very much pro free market (in the “no regulation at all” approach).
> I know a software engineer who is very much against net neutrality. He also happens to be very much pro free market (in the “no regulation at all” approach).
Is he also in favor of ending the monopolies that ISPs have over Internet access in most places in the US? I'm also pro free market, and if ISPs were a free market I would also be against net neutrality as a government regulation. But ISPs are not a free market; they are huge beneficiaries of government regulation. So net neutrality is one of those unfortunate cases where we need government regulation to offset the effects of other government regulation. That's the bet we can do if having a truly free market is not an option.
Right when I was first learning about libertarianism and it was really appealing to me, I was also listening to a whole bunch of Martin Luther King Jr speeches. MLK was extremely smart and well read - a genuine philosopher of great value. As much as he valued community based power, and as much as the democrats stifled and blocked his movement at almost every step of the way, he still believed there was a time for government action. When a great mass of people are starving or struggling to merely get by, the government can and in his opinion should help. And it's hard to argue against that. The state is a cause of a great many problems - mass incarceration, the obstruction of black freedom movements, drone killings, and more which must be stopped - but at the same time, the state is an institution we have now. We must build our own resilient institutions to replace the state, but I think it ignores the suffering of millions to say the state should never be used to help the less privileged. I get really frustrated with libertarian types that would dismantle useful state programs before we've got something to replace them. They seem uninterested in the suffering that might cause, and I think they would do well to focus more advocacy on building the replacements before dismantling government systems.
Interestingly I've learned that there is a big difference between "left libertarians" and "right libertarians". I think the left libertarians and the socialist anarchists could actually be allies if they could get past all their language differences and knee jerk reactions. My roommate is a knowledgeable left libertarian and it's amazing how similar our end goals are but how different our language and conceptual frameworks for getting there can sometimes be.
"They eagerly seek you, not commendably, but they wish to shut you out, in order that you may seek them."
Yeah, it's from the Bible. Yeah, Paul was talking about something completely different from political programs. It still seems to fit. There are people who seek to destroy the existing system first, in order that there will be no alternative but to build a replacement. They thereby show that they seriously doubt their ability to persuade people that their alternative is better. (They also assume that their alternative is the only alternative, or at least is the one that will be chosen. They are, I think, over-optimistic in doing so.)
> I think it ignores the suffering of millions to say the state should never be used to help the less privileged.
If the state actually did help the less privileged, that would be one thing. But the state programs that claim to help the less privileged, mostly don't. And even when they do, the hoops the less privileged have to jump through to get the help are ridiculous. My wife and I have a friend who is on food stamps; he's disabled and unable to work, has been for years. Every year when his food stamps come up for renewal, even though not a single thing has changed with his situation, the county finds a way to screw it up and we have to call them and get it straightened out. Imagine what happens to people who don't have friends that can help them navigate the system.
The root of the problem is not that helping the less privileged is a bad thing; it's that the state is the worst possible tool for the job.
> I get really frustrated with libertarian types that would dismantle useful state programs before we've got something to replace them.
We do have something to replace them: private charity. Anyone can found a nonprofit charity organization to help the less privileged. And they would do a much better job of it than the state does. The fact that the state is doing it at all hurts the actual ability to help people, because the people who would actually do a good job at it are thinking that the state is already taking care of it so they don't have to. Which means that there are actually more people who need help that are not getting it, than there would be if the state were simply out of the business altogether and everybody knew that it was up to them, as private individuals and private charities, to do it.
A lot of people, me included, would argue that the state, as inefficient as it is, is doing much better than private charity would, and has historically done.
Also, "we have an idea that could in theory replace them" is not the same as "we have the structures in place and shown capable to replace them".
> A lot of people, me included, would argue that the state, as inefficient as it is, is doing much better than private charity would, and has historically done.
I would want to see a lot of data to back this up--and it would have to be accurate data, including accurate data on how often the state makes things worse instead of actually helping. I don't have such accurate data on a global scale, and I don't think you do either. The state does not even measure how much harm its employees do; it has no incentive to do so.
> "we have an idea that could in theory replace them" is not the same as "we have the structures in place and shown capable to replace them".
"Replace" assumes that the current structures are providing a net benefit. If they're actually a net cost--if they do more harm than good, all things considered, which I suspect is true for the state if we could actually get accurate data on all the harm as well as all the good--then replacing them with nothing whatever would still be a net gain. Of course replacing them with something that actually did the job the state is supposed to do would be better still, but the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
> I think the left libertarians and the socialist anarchists could actually be allies if they could get past all their language differences and knee jerk reactions.
Could you give an example of what you mean by this?
Sure. Both groups want an end to control by the state. They have different ideas about voluntary structures of power in a stateless society, but as they are voluntary I don’t see an inherent conflict.
However they have such different terms for things they typically get really upset at each other when talking. For example they use the term “capitalism” very differently. Socialist anarchists are against “capitalism” for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that is enables cronyism. However libertarians are pro “capitalism” and yet very against cronyism. So both groups are strongly against cronyism, but they can’t seem to get along well enough to fight cronyism together.
Libertarians advocate for “capitalism” which they see as markets unimpeded by the state. Anarchists also don’t want the state interfering in their exchanges. They may place rules on their exchanges but this would be on a voluntary basis, so they could seemingly coexist with libertarians who just want to rely on markets.
Both sides also seem to be against intellectual property restrictions. Another place to work together.
In my personal vision, an anarchist communist society could, and I think should, still take advantage of markets for certain situations. I think it makes sense for individuals to be protected by communal structures, but those communes might use markets to distribute goods in addition to politically coordinated exchanges.
Libertarians don’t want much of the above, but if it’s truly voluntary they’re not against it either. Though they are super touchy when you talk to them about this and they don’t accept any of it until they understand you really want it to be voluntary.
My libertarian friend also really surprises me sometimes. He said recently the state should release control of all hospitals to the hospital workers who have been running them. Like they did some kind of homesteading so they should be the ones to own the hospital. Well that sounds a lot like a worker owned collective!
I think it's important to recognize that markets can exist without capitalism, and the position "markets are useful sometimes" doesn't mean that you believe in capitalism.
If you have questions I'd be happy to answer them, but I'd recommend doing more research before making sweeping generalizations about "anarchists", "libertarians", "capitalism", etc.
I’ve met Richard Wolff and have read his book Democracy at Work. I’m pretty familiar with his work.
I think you’re missing my point. I think left libertarians and socialist anarchists could be allies. They seem to want almost the same thing. They just can’t stand talking to each other because they use terms that make the other extremely skeptical. It’s difficult for me to use precise language when trying to bring two groups together who use that language very differently. So I know I’m speaking in broad terms. Certainly anarchist and libertarian are very broad and not all of them think alike.
But I think people who like the idea of anarchist socialism might actually like what certain left libertarians have to say. That is my point.
Don’t take my word for it. Check out Roderick Long and you tell me if he makes sense to you.
What gives you the impression that these are different groups that "could be allies" but "can't stand talking to each other"? Every resource I can find seems to say that social anarchism is a subset of left libertarianism.
Ah I see, but also not entirely true either, they were divided internally as well. There are 5 commissioners, 2 of them were actually pro NN, the other 2 + chairman Pai were against it, so they were overruled.
I don't think it's really that the comments matter all that much, the judge explains it pretty well I thought:
"Here, disclosing the originating IP addresses and user-agent headers would help clarify whether and to what extent fraudulent activity interfered with the comment process for the FCC's [net neutrality repeal], and more generally, the extent to which administrative rulemaking may be vulnerable to corruption. This serves a vital public interest because of the importance of public comments in agency rulemaking," Schofield wrote.
There were very large numbers of comments both for and against net neutrality, but the ones against net neutrality seemed to largely be autogenerated and fraudulent, using names of people who said they didn't write them.
The parent is just pointing out that whether genuine or fraudulent, the comments didn't matter.
I have had the same thought, and I am not sure why the veracity of the comments is fomenting so much anger. No matter what the comments had said, the FCC would have done the same thing; Pai had been very clear about his opinion on net neutrality over the course of many years.
Abuse of power is important to curtail. If public officials are falsifying public comments, that matters. And to many American citizens, the truth still matters.
As for your actual premise, ‘the comments didn’t matter’, the rest of your comment invalidates your premise. Because if the comments did not matter, then the FCC would feel no need to fake the result.
What you mean to say is, ‘the comments would not effect the outcome of the FCC’s decision.’ And we can have a proper opinionated debate as to whether that is true. But the comments clearly ‘matter’.
I got the impression the NYT is waging this battle more to figure out who was behind fraudulent comments rather than to determine which comments were fraudulent and which were legitimate.
First rule of any good investigative reporting: follow the money. Whoever paid for the comments must have had some motivation for committing fraud and identity theft en masse.
The fact that the FCC is fighting to keep the comment-purchasers IP address(es) secret is telling in and of itself though I suppose.
The comments do matter. Like another person here said: they aren't youtube comments. The FCC comment system is a part of the regulation writing process, and the FCC is required by law to thoroughly consider public comments when making rules. If the FCC ignored almost all genuine comments and knowingly followed the advice of fraudulent comments, it could be grounds for a court to waive Chevron Deference and order the commission to reconsider with a new comment period.
We can't just abandon vectors for the populace to hold governmental agencies to account. If anything we need to push to make it so that the people have more sway in cases where the people making decisions were not elected.
There were large numbers of comments on both sides made by people who denied writing them when asked. WSJ found thousands of people who denied writing a particular pro-NN message with their names attached.
>Based on this analysis, we estimate that 91% of all anti-net-neutrality submissions, and 79% of all pro-net-neutrality submissions, came from bots.
Their survey data is mostly inconsistent with the WSJ data. See https://archive.fo/sp9Q7. WSJ had multiple orders of magnitude higher sample size, so I'd go with their numbers.
No, they werent. The comments are already public, my text analytics company used them for a demo of our sentiment analysis. Almost all of the duplicate comments were anti-neutrality, only about 1% of verbatim-duplicate comments were pro-neutrality.
How does "verbatim-duplicate" mean botted and fraudulent exclusively? You're absolutely wrong. Most of the pro-NN comments, again, were posted by individuals who had no knowledge of the comments.
The comments are the proof that the Ajit Pai and the FCC went into the process already planning to axe net neutrality and ignored the real comments put forth by net neutrality supporters in favor of fake comments put forth by net neutrality detractors that arguably constitute identity theft. [1]
FCC comments are like petitions: useless, virtual-signaling, pseudo-actions that are easily ignored. Calling reps and challenging their re-election prospects are the most fundamental ways to influence the FCC because the corporations have the most say when the people don't make enough noise.
There is a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires executive agencies to follow a process while engaging in rulemaking. Part of the process is a public comment period, and agencies are required to substantively address the concerns in public comments. If, for example, the public comment process is 99% against a proposal and the agency proceeds without having a VERY good argument, it can get struck down by judicial review.
Pai knows this, and the fact that the public comments on net neutrality rulemaking were so obviously manipulated has made people think there is at least a possibility that he, or the FCC, was complicit, in order to flout the APA. The fact that the agency has gone out of its way to cover the situation up does not inspire much confidence, either.
TL;DR: A bunch of comments on a website could result in the FCC's actions being struck down in court.
Very good question! This all falls under what is called the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). While it sounds very dull, like it involves making sure bureaucrats fill out the right forms, it's actually a very important limit on the power of the executive branch. Especially in the last century we've seen the executive branch get bigger and bigger, with more and more government agencies giving significant power to bureaucrats appointed by the President: unelected, and some not even confirmed by the Senate. A large portion of regulations are set by them, and the worry is that the second the other party takes over the White House they will immediately change all the regulations to their choosing, and back and forth. Regulations rapidly changing based on which party is in control, not to mention being subject to the whims of often unelected bureaucrats, is really bad for consumers and businesses. At its core, the APA says that changes to regulations cannot be "arbitrary and capricious": i.e. that someone can't just arbitrarily create, remove, or change regulations just because they feel like it. There is a required procedure you have to do to change regulations. You have to propose your change, have a public comment period where anyone (ordinary people, industry people, activists, everyone) can voice their concerns, and then they have to make a decision. They also have to specifically address people's concerns and give a specific rationale why they agree with this person and disagree with that person, and so on. If a change is made to a regulation that doesn't respond to all of the concerns expressed, or has a rationale that doesn't make sense, you can sue and have the change stopped.
Long story short, that is why comments on a website genuinely matter to the regulatory process.
EDIT: as a side note, the current administration has been sued a lot over APA violations. Most of the lawsuits brought by states against the federal government you hear about in the news hinge on the APA. An example off the top of my head is the repeal of DACA. Now, DACA was an executive order and could have been un-done by an executive order (executive orders are mostly not subject to the APA). But Trump did not make an executive order repealing DACA: instead the Attorney General removed the rule himself, which means his decision was subject to APA review. As a part of this he had to publish a document explaining why he was going to repeal it. In it he said the reason he was repealing DACA was because he believed it was unconstitutional. A number of states have sued over this change, and one of the legal arguments used is an APA violation, because there is no evidence that DACA is unconstitutional. Which gets to what I find interesting about the APA; it forces the person making the change to specifically spell out their reasoning and rationalization for making that change. If their reasoning is faulty you can sue, and the federal government can't defend it by throwing about alternative rationales for the decision.
> the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). While it sounds very dull
If you read SCOTUS opinions, it feels like every other case with the U.S. government involves the APA. It's a powerful piece of legislation preventing agencies from abusing their rule-making power.
Its a skirmish in the campaign being waged by our intelligence services and others who insist the Russian government has been waging a secret campaign to attack our country and "sow division" by using sockpuppets and spam posts on a variety of platforms.
I don't have much of a problem with this ruling given that all commenters were warned:
"every commenter was provided with a privacy notice, stating that '[a]ll information submitted, including names and addresses, will be publicly available via the Web.'"
If public comments were not a part of the decision-making process, then the agencies in question wouldn't be asking for public comments.
If they are asking for them, and piping them into /dev/null, that's a scandal that FOIA requests can reveal. It also gives political capital for a subsequent administration to overturn a ruling with minimal fuss.
Comment periods for draft laws certainly do have an impact. It's basically an opportunity for people to weigh in on the law and get a pulse check on how onboard people are.
because in the last decade or so, if not more, the common method of attack has been to shame. not debate on merits, in public shame. don't believe for a minute they won't resort to combining the information to find people. they will also pretty much write off any ip addresses linked to questionable IPs that supported the cause the paper needs supported.
sadly in this inter connected world it is far easier to name and shame people which thwarts any useful discussion, it is no different than voter intimidation; which is why one side wants to do away with secret ballots in unionization pushes.
winning is all that is cared about.
what are we going to do when either the NYT or another organization links back those ids to private individuals, just hashtag apologize and ignore it?
There are no “private” individuals who commented. These are public comments. As in, they are on the public record. A full name and address was required in order to submit a comment. There is no privacy or anonymity when you’re commenting on the public record.
The NYT of any other organization can pull the filing and see each and every name and address associated with a comment. No combing or linking back to IDs needed. It’s all there for the entire world the see as part of the public record. The information that will be exposed by this ruling is the IP address(es) of whoever fraudulently commented using other people’s names and addresses.
When his run at the FCC ends I think history will remember Pai as the big telco tool that he is. His leadership (sic) at the FCC has been appalling. I can’t wait for him to be gone so that, hopefully, the damage can be repaired by someone else.
FCC under Pai does the same basic thing FCC has always done and in fact was created to do: help Ma Bell and her descendants eliminate competition and screw customers. The details may change over the decades, but the bottom line does not.
The thing about Pai is that he is really good at the politics part of his job. I was listening to a podcast where he was interviewed, and at the end I was almost convinced he actually cares about the American public and what's best for them.
If you're talking about Freakonomic's episode with him then it's widely considered to be the worst episode in the podcast. Just read the comments: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ajit-pai/
He does uses simpleton sort of language and pretends to be friendly neighbour but if you pay at least a little bit of attention then it's just full of lies, diversions and every possible argumenting fallacy.
People were actually really upset with the host for allowing this.
> Tom Wheeler defeats the broadband industry: Net neutrality wins in court
> Total victory for FCC as appeals court decision upholds net neutrality order.
I think the top comment on ArsTechnica there is telling:
If you told me 5 years ago that a 20-year lobbyist veteran would be named the head of the FCC and reclassify the wired and wireless internet agencies under Title II, I'd have punched you in the arm and called you a fucking liar.
I have never been more happy to be proven wrong about a book's cover than I have been with Mr. Wheeler.
That article says the exact opposite of what you claim:
> The ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed victory to Verizon by rejecting the legal framework of the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to regulate the telecom giant and its peers based on net neutrality rules. Such net neutrality, or open Internet, rules aim to prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Verizon from offering tiered broadband services that would push content providers—such as Netflix or Amazon—to pay more for faster delivery of their content. The rules also prevent ISPs from blocking lawful Internet applications and services.
Wheeler was suing them to enforce NN standards!
Here's and article[1] 2 years later after he successfully appealed that decision:
> Tom Wheeler defeats the broadband industry: Net neutrality wins in court
> The net neutrality order, passed over a year ago, is FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's signature move during a whirlwind time as head of the commission.
He didn't enforce net neutrality even one time, despite flagrant violations under his tenure.
You're just posting his marketing speak. Tom Wheeler was vehemently against net neutrality and spent his entire career fighting it, both as a lobbyist and as the FCC head.
Have you read the article you keep linking? Tom Wheeler wasn’t behind the decision that article is about. A panel of federal judges were. Tom Wheeler is directly quoted in that article saying he hopes to appeal the decision because he (and the FCC, at the time) disagreed with it.
NN has gained favor in the recent years. And since Pai is so anti-NN should a blue wave take over in a November I could see things moving back farther in the direction of sanity — towards true NN. But I’m not sure; j just have hope.
I don't think the FCC's pushback is based on lack of competence or inability to write simple scripts. That's just what they are trying to fool the courts with. I think they are covering up, because Pai knows where a lot of the fake comments came from: the sources of the fake comments will be discovered, and it will look bad for the industry when it comes out.
Aren’t they also the agency giving the green light to massive violations of consumer privacy by allowing ISPs to data warehouse and monetize browsing histories? And they have the nerve to claim that they want to keep IP addresses private in just this one case where it benefits themselves.
How do they still have all this data? Under GDPR (yes, it's European, I know) after a reasonable amount of time (=14 days) you gotta delete all the PII out of the logs. Does US law really allow storing mostly irrelevant logs for so long, and who pays for storing them?
When you make a comment you are acknowledging that you are entering information to form part of the public record. I've not examined the specific FCC form but I would almost guarantee it clearly explains that your comment and likely metadata around it are protected in some ways by the Privacy Act of 1974 and explicitly not protected in other ways.
These logs could form the basis of a legal record generated by the executive branch of the government and even if they weren't they are likely subject to a legal hold as a result of on-going legal action.
Records in the government sense are very important to form an open trail of policy decisions and overall function of government. Deleting them accidentally can get you a firm slap on the wrist while deleting them intentionally can put you in legal trouble (and worse if you're doing it to cover-up wrongdoing).
The National Archives (NARA) holds on to all the various records generated by the functioning of the federal government for various time periods based on the content of the records. As to payment - costs are incurred in part by the generating agencies and then the taxpayers funding NARA.
Further reading: Privacy Act of 1974, [1], FCC's Comment Filing System System of Records in the Federal Register [2], Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (more towards only collecting necessary info), and FCC's Website Notices [3].
> When you make a comment you are acknowledging that you are entering information to form part of the public record. I've not examined the specific FCC form
I have since I actually submitted a comment on this very rulemaking. Your description is correct.
Only if you have no legitimate reason to retain it, under the gdpr. Which isn’t relevant here anyway as the US (outside California) doesn’t have anything similar. In this case, the rules require a period of public comment. You could argue whether the IP address is relevant to this public comment, but there’s at least an argument that it is (in this case the concern is that a lot of the public comment may be fake).
Even in countries implementing the gdpr, I’d expect that metadata is retained in this sort of usecase.
Funny how a government agency considers it overly burdensome to write what is likely a 4 line script, so goes through a lawsuit that costs taxpayers likely millions of dollars to avoid it. Unless their infrastructure is well and truly F*ed, this is a 30-60 minute task for a junior server admin. Most likely they already ran it and didn't like what it revealed so it's even less effort.