How an Investigation of Fake FCC Comments Snared a Prominent DC Media Firm

Millions of records that the Federal Communications Commission’s top lawyer once fought to hold back from state law enforcement officials now serve as key evidence in a year-long probe into cases of Americans being impersonated during the agency’s latest net neutrality proceeding. Analysis of the data would lead investigators to consider, as one of many potential sources of fraud, the owner of an influential Washington (DC) newspaper, CQ Roll Call, whose advocacy business may have served as a pipeline for one of the most notorious of all fake comments. Internal FCC logs document in exhaustive detail each time an organization such as CQ—the advocacy side of the company—submitted a comment using the FCC’s API system. What’s more, they include the IP addresses of the uploaders themselves, as well as timestamps that record, down to the millisecond, precisely when floods of comments came pouring in from any given source.