In response to a FOIA lawsuit, FCC admits in court that its Electronic Comment Filing System isn't designed to track the sources of comments
Dell Cameron / Gizmodo : Tweets: @dellcam Tweets: Dell Cameron / @dellcam : Scoop(ish): In response to @nickconfessore's #FOIA lawsuit, the @FCC openly admitted in court that tracking the sources of fake comments is beyond its technical capabilities. I concisely explain how @Gizmodo was able to, hopefully w/o being too confusing. http://gizmodo.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The FCC has spent two years defending the integrity of its Electronic Comment Filing System since millions of fake comments flooded the 2017 net neutrality docket — an investigation tied hundreds of thousands of them to CQ Roll Call, and an inspector general report dismantled the agency's claim that a cyberattack had knocked the system offline. Under pressure from two senators, Ajit Pai pledged to rebuild and re-engineer the comment system.
This court filing is the first formal acknowledgment of why that rebuild matters: asked under FOIA to trace where comments came from, the FCC told a judge its system simply was never built to record provenance. That admission hands ammunition to litigants and reporters chasing the fake-comment story, and it foreshadows the agency's later decision to scrap and replace ECFS entirely and a judge's order to hand over the IP logs behind the 2017 comments.
First-order effects
- Nick Confessore's FOIA lawsuit gains immediate leverage: the FCC's own admission that ECFS cannot track comment sources undermines any claim that the requested records are being withheld rather than nonexistent.
- Journalists and researchers investigating the fake-comment campaign lose the option of asking the FCC itself for attribution data — provenance work now depends entirely on outside forensics like the CQ Roll Call reporting.
Second-order effects
- The admission converts Pai's vague rebuild pledge into a concrete engineering mandate with auditability at its core, since a replacement system that still cannot log sources would leave the agency exposed to the same litigation.
- Intermediaries in the comment-supply chain — firms like CQ Roll Call that submitted bulk comments — face heightened scrutiny, because with the agency unable to attribute comments, courts and press will pursue whoever filed them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, federal comment systems get redesigned as auditable infrastructure — with source logging and identity controls built in — shifting public-input rulemaking from an honor system toward verifiable records.
- Agencies that cannot attribute public input risk delegitimizing their own dockets, pushing Congress and courts to treat comment integrity as a compliance requirement rather than a technical afterthought.
The trend: Public-comment infrastructure is being forced to evolve from a passive inbox into auditable systems with built-in provenance tracking, driven by fraud investigations and FOIA litigation.