FCC to Cough Up $43,000 Settlement for Refusing to Turn Over Fake Comment Records

Dell Cameron Mar 22, 2019. 13 comments

en fr es de pt tr vi ms it nl da id no tl pl fi sv ru ja ko hi th zh-cn el uk

Ajit Pai FCC Foia Net Neutrality

While not admitting to doing anything wrong, the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday settled a lawsuit for tens of thousands of dollars after unlawfully withholding records from a reporter under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The FCC will pay over $43,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs to New York journalist Jason Prechtel over records he initially requested almost two years ago concerning its 2017 net neutrality proceeding. Represented by Chicago law firm Loevy & Loevy, Prechtel sued the FCC in a Washington, D.C., federal court after it failed to respond to his request in the timeframe provided under the statute.

The data Prechtel ultimately obtained through the case formed the basis of a Gizmodo report last month—which he coauthored—that revealed how investigators had linked various entities, including a prominent Washington, D.C., publication, to potentially millions of fraudulent comments submitted during the 2017 net neutrality rollback.

The same data was previously withheld from law enforcement investigators by the FCC’s top lawyer citing jurisdictional and privacy concerns. Prechtel eventually obtained it under FOIA from a separate agency.

“After a year and a half of litigation and a court order requiring production of requested records, FCC agreed to pay $43,077.80 to wrap up the case,” said attorney Joshua Burday, who represent Prechtel in court. “This is a good reminder that you don’t need to be able to afford a lawyer to exercise your FOIA rights.”

The settlement, which formally dismisses Prechtel’s case, includes a standard stipulation that the FCC does not admit any liability or fault as a result. The commission was represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Johnny Walker.

The amount recouped by Loevy & Loevy is far above average, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research center at Syracuse University. For every 50 or so plaintiffs awarded less than $10,000, only about five are awarded fees ranging from $50,000 to $75,000. The fees, awarded at judges’ discretion, are not routine, TRAC says.

Judges are empowered under FOIA to “assess against the United States reasonable attorney fees and other litigation costs reasonable incurred” when, according to the statute, the plaintiff has “substantially prevailed.” The fees enable FOIA attorneys to take on more pro bono cases from journalists, like Prechtel, who are not supported financially by large corporations.

Earlier this week, the FCC admitted in a separate but related FOIA lawsuit brought by the New York Times that its public comment system lacked the technical capacity to track who’s responsible for the flood of counterfeit comments it received during the notice-and-comment process.

As of October, investigators at New York’s Bureau of Internet and Technology believed that nearly half of the 23 million public comments related to the 2017 net neutrality proceedings used names and home addresses of Americans without their consent.

13 Comments

NipperDawg Mar 22, 2019

So basically the government fined the government to pay the government , and yet no one is held responsible?

BakaPenguin Mar 22, 2019

They paid a private law firm, Loevy & Loevy. Otherwise, you got it right. I guess they did manage to claw a bit of information out of the FCC, too.

eager.ophiuchus Mar 22, 2019

Did the government really pay anything? Or did all of us?

Silverware Gorilla Mar 22, 2019

So basically, the FCC admits no wrong doing, doesn’t remedy the problem, and sweeps the cause of it under the rug, and the only money changing hands is basically they paid the attorney’s fees to the lawyers of the journalist suing them for information that should have been public anyway...

So it’s basically back to square one.

Zach Miller Mar 22, 2019

“Rather than hand over the data, we’d rather just pay a large sum of money in order to not do that.”

Wonderful.

mote Mar 22, 2019

Not even that large.

Justin Culmo Mar 22, 2019

“Large Sum”

My Student Loans are twice that. They basically got f ined ( 1) Nissan Maxima for trying to cover their tracks in a national scam that likely made FCC leaders into instant millionaires....and it’s taxpayer money.

boobsandbacon Mar 22, 2019

Just imagine if you were a criminal and they said, hand over the data or info you have and you say, nah can’t do that. Then the judge says, well alright, thats fair. Buuuut you do gotta pay the state prosecutor’s salary and you can go home. Man do I love my country’s legal system.

500 Days of Kitten Calamari Mar 23, 2019

Point of order: they had t o turn over the docs as well. They admitted no wrongdoing and of course have not reversed the corrupt ruling they made using these fake comments as smokescreen.

czargarble Mar 22, 2019

Another fine moment for fiscal conservatism.

Les Mikesell Mar 23, 2019

Oh, neat - we’ll give you some taxpayer money rather than rat out the company we are in bed with. How does a court let that fly?

AlphaLolz Mar 26, 2019

In short, the FCC was fined less than what Verizon is probably bribing Ajit Pai with each week. Nice job...

mote Mar 22, 2019

This does not seem like a win, at all.

Other Dell Cameron's posts

Arrest Data Exposed by South Carolina Firm Included Personal Info of Juvenile Suspects

Sensitive data related to roughly 5.2 million arrests in the state of South Carolina were discovered exposed online last month by a California-based security company, Gizmodo has learned. A small percentage of those arrested were juveniles at the time.A researcher at the security firm UpGuard discovered the files in an open cloud store bucket last month among multiple 14...

Apple Pushes Back as Senate's Nightmare Anti-Encryption Push Comes Back From the Dead

The enormous fissure that formed decades ago in the deathless American debate over encryption proved insurmountable on Tuesday. Senate lawmakers struggled to be heard on the all-important topic by the two tech company suits that they invited over mostly for the purpose of serving as punching bags.Supposedly aimed at analyzing the “benefits and risks” of granting law enforcement the...

Ring’s Hidden Data Let Us Map Amazon's Sprawling Home Surveillance Network

As reporters raced this summer to bring new details of Ring’s law enforcement contracts to light, the home security company, acquired last year by Amazon for a whopping $1 billion, strove to underscore the privacy it had pledged to provide users.Even as its creeping objective of ensuring an ever-expanding network of home security devices eventually become indispensable to daily police...

Website Calls for Investigation of Ring, Gets Blocked by Facebook

A leading digital rights organization on Tuesday said that Facebook was actively blocking its users from sharing a link to a web page critical of Amazon that labels its internet-connected home security products—namely, Ring doorbell cameras—a threat to “privacy, civil liberties, and security”.Gizmodo independently confirmed that Facebook has blocked the URL, investigateamazon.com . At the time of writing, Facebook...

FCC to Cough Up $43,000 Settlement for Refusing to Turn Over Fake Comment Records

13 Comments

Other Dell Cameron's posts

Suggested posts

Language