What do Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), deceased actress Patty Duke, a 13-year-old from upstate New York and a 96-year-old veteran from Southern California have in common?
They appear to have filed comments in the net neutrality record at the Federal Communications Commission. That ought to mean they went online, submitted their names and addresses, and typed out their thoughts about Internet regulatory policy. But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, each of these individuals — along with 2 million others — had their identities stolen and used to file fake comments.
These fake comments were not the only unnerving thing in the FCC net neutrality record. In the course of its deliberations on the future of Internet openness, the agency logged about half a million comments sent from Russian email addresses. It received nearly 8 million comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com with almost identical wording.
Read full article
