A startling report published by David L Hunt, the Inspector General of Federal Communications Commission, says that the Ajit Pai led organization is said to have faked a cyber attack during the height of last year’s ‘Net Neutrality’ debate.
But in reality, the so-called “Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) attack did not take place in real and was actually premeditated to gain sympathy from Congress.
However, the wrong info relay led to the rise of suspicion from some senior members of Congress, promoting deeper investigation into whether senior officials at the FCC have broken a law.
Note- Net Neutrality means banning services providers like Google from filtering lawful online content to a specific country, region or state. In simple terms that mean, the content available on the internet should be freely accessible to the populace of every country. At the same time, it also bans the broadband service providers from interfering with the content and applications on the internet.
Last year on May 7th, the comedian John Oliver ran a segment on his popular ‘Last Week Tonight’ Show asking viewers to express their solidarity against the FCC on net neutrality bill for restoring internet freedom.
As a result of Oliver’s preaching on TV and on Twitter, the FCC website was flooded with traffic which eventually led to the disruption of the website on the same night.
The next morning, an Official from Ajit Pai’s office said that the website was down due to high fabricated traffic which was probably caused by some state-funded actor. Even David Bray, the former CIO of FCC admitted the announcement as true and said that it could be classified as a non-traditional DDoS attack which doesn’t take place usually. The same thing was also reported to Congress the following week.
The report published by David Hunt on August 6th, 2018 says that the IT department running the website of FCC knew that an episode is going to be run on Oliver’s show which could surge up the traffic to the website at any movement during or after the show.
However, they did not take sufficient steps to increase the server’s operational capacity which eventually led to the disruption and shut down of the website.
And when the website disruption spread like wildfire in the media, FCC decided to tarnish the heavy traffic to a DDoS attack launched by a foreign nation. And the same thing was reported to the Congress.
In the year 2017, Congress found something suspicious in the story of FCC chief Ajit Pai and ordered a detailed probe. And it was discovered in the probe that most of the story said by Mr. Pai was untrue.
Later, the resources of the Congress determined that the commission misled Congress when it came to the nature of the alleged attack, and the whole of the story was handed over to FBI.
Since, December last year, Pai smartly shrugged off his hands by passing the buck to the CIO Bray and the former administration staff. And said that he was informed so and so the same was presented before the Congress.
After all these allegations against Pai were brought before the media, the Fight for the Future organization- which is in support for net neutrality advocacy has asked the chief to step down before more revelations are brought forward.
Currently, the Justice Department has denied commenting on the issue and said that the details will be out after the conclusion of the full inquiry.
