{"id":178229,"date":"2019-02-02T19:31:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-03T00:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/02\/02\/daym-im-not-paranoid-enough\/"},"modified":"2019-02-02T19:31:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T00:31:00","slug":"daym-im-not-paranoid-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/02\/02\/daym-im-not-paranoid-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Daym!!! I’m Not Paranoid Enough!!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"
I knew that the FCC was flooded with bogus comments about their repeal of net neutrality, but I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams would have imagined that Roger Stone and his Evil Minions\u2122<\/sup> would be at the bottom of this<\/a>:<\/div>\n

An organization run by a former Trump campaign statewide director is being investigated by the New York attorney general\u2019s office for its role in the submission of potentially hundreds of thousands of fraudulent comments to the Federal Communications Commission during the agency\u2019s 2017 efforts to rollback Obama-era net neutrality rules.<\/p>\n

Research by Gizmodo reveals the group\u2019s deep ties to prominent GOP firms, including one paid more than $31 million by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to provide email lists of potential voters during the 2016 campaign. Americans whose names were attached to fraudulent FCC comments linked to the ex-Trump campaign staffer confirmed during a series of interviews that their identities had been stolen.<\/p>\n

Asked how their names wound up on the FCC\u2019s website next comments slamming \u201cwealthy leftist billionaires and powerful Silicon Valley monopolies,\u201d the residents of Sharpsburg, Georgia, were reasonably confused. Like two retirees in their 80s whom Gizmodo spoke with on Wednesday, many residents say they\u2019ve never even heard of net neutrality.<\/p>\n

But in Sharpsburg, a town of less than 400, roughly a quarter of the population seemingly filed comments with the FCC about net neutrality\u2014at least according to its website. Of those comments, 37 are perfectly identical: \u201cIt took only two years and a green light from Obama for companies like Google and Facebook and their liberal allies like George Soros to take total control of the dominant information and communications platform in the world today,\u201d they read. \u201cThe future of a free and open Internet is at stake.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

\u201cWhoever did this is stupid,\u201d said another man, after learning his name and address had been used without his consent. \u201cThey won\u2019t find my IP address anywhere near this. And I\u2019d be happy to talk to police about it.\u201d A total of five Sharpsburg residents, whose names had been used to send identical comments to the FCC, told Gizmodo this week that their identities must have been stolen.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

What\u2019s remained unreported until now is the source of the 37 identical Sharpsburg comments, which match those submitted on behalf of more than 300,000 Americans nationwide. That comment, which rails against Google, its former chairman Eric Schmidt, and \u201cglobal billionaires like George Soros,\u201d was authored by a group known as Free Our Internet, according to a page on its website<\/a>, which has since been deleted.<\/p>\n

Free Our Internet\u2019s campaign against net neutrality, which it presents as a conspiracy by \u201cliberal globalists to take over our Internet,\u201d was first announced in a now-deleted press release on the website of Raven Strategies, a political consultancy whose client list includes, among others, Donald Trump for President.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

By comparison, Free Our Internet has a small online footprint\u2014this despite being the apparent source of upwards of 800,000 gathered comments. The organization\u2019s submission page, meant to be the online portal through which all those comments were collected, has been tweeted no more than two dozen times. Free Our Internet\u2019s website was boosted on occasion, however, by a few well-known characters on the far-right, such as longtime Trump adviser and self-described \u201cdirty trickster\u201d Roger Stone and his one-time friend, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Roger, you have been a very busy boy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew that the FCC was flooded with bogus comments about their repeal of net neutrality, but I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams would have imagined that Roger Stone and his Evil Minions\u2122 would be at the bottom of this: An organization run by a former Trump campaign statewide director is being …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,364,367,374,437],"class_list":["post-178229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-internet","tag-politics","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}