Imagine if 500,000 Russians, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley were able to successfully cast votes in an American election today.
While the King of Rock won鈥檛 be casting a ballot any time soon, those individuals appeared to have made their voices heard in the at the Federal Communications Commission.
This happened because of the lack of limits on who can comment on an agency鈥檚 proposed rules. To comment, you don鈥檛 need to be an American citizen. You can comment as often as you鈥檇 like, using your own name or even a computer-generated comment with a fictitious name. It鈥檚 a hacker鈥檚 paradise.
Though none of this would be allowed in a U.S. election, it is all too often the norm in the creation of federal rules affecting American businesses and individuals.
These rules are written not by , but instead by an army of independent and executive agencies tasked with enacting broad, and often , legislative mandates via federal rulemakings.
The Administrative Procedure Act establishes the rules of the road for these rulemakings. An agency must give notice to the public that it proposes to write new rules; then, the public can comment on those proposals. The agency must then review the record before publishing an order detailing its final rules, along with the legal and policy rationales for enacting them.
No doubt, these 鈥渘otice and comment鈥� rulemakings are a far cry from the preferred style of lawmaking conducted by publicly-elected legislators held accountable by the voting public.
This reality makes a detailing myriad abuses of various agencies鈥� online commenting systems all the more concerning. According to the report, 鈥淸m]ost federal agencies lack appropriate processes to address allegations that people have submitted comments under fraudulent identities.鈥� Consequently, countless comments have been submitted under stolen identities, with no potential recourse for victims. Even more contain profane and threatening language, including threats against government officials.
Perhaps most amazingly, the FCC鈥檚 Electronic Comment Filing System allows individuals to post fully executable installation files as attachments to their comments鈥攊ncluding malware. This means that your computer can become infected simply because you visit a federal government website.
The full range of these problems was illustrated by the FCC鈥檚 Restoring Internet Freedom proceeding. Leading up to the proceeding, and alike criticized the Commission for moving to repeal Obama-era Internet rules and on the proceeding. Consequently, the record contains 鈥攖he most for any proceeding in the agency鈥檚 history.
Of these 24 million comments, 500,000 were linked to Russian email addresses. Nearly 8 million more came from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com. According to , two million were filed using a stolen identity. Hundreds of thousands contained various forms of profanity, as well as hundreds more with suicidal threats. More than one hundred comments were submitted by 鈥淎dolf Hitler,鈥� 鈥淩ichard Nixon,鈥� 鈥淩onald Reagan,鈥� and 鈥� Elvis Presley.鈥� Multiple commenters submitted the entire texts of and .
According to , only 6% of all comments in the proceeding were unique. The other 94% were submitted multiple times鈥攕ometimes, hundreds of thousands of times. The seven most-prevalent comments were submitted more than 500,000 times each, comprising 38% of all submissions. On nine separate occasions, more than 75,000 comments were submitted at the same exact second. According to , in a random sample of 2,757 comments, 72% of respondents surveyed claimed that they had not submitted comments that were in fact listed under their names.
Clearly, the way in which agencies collect and maintain comments is fundamentally broken. But there is a potential solution. And to discover it, we need merely look to the past.
Before the advent of electronic commenting, interested parties to federal rulemakings submitted comments via the postal system. The essential applicable element of this system to our current predicament was friction. This friction served as a barrier to the types of fraudsters and other bads actors harming today鈥檚 rulemakings. By introducing a small fee for electronic public comments鈥攑erhaps the price of a postage stamp鈥攚e can reintroduce this friction.
A foundational element of American democracy is the ability of everyday Americans to have their voices heard. But because of today鈥檚 broken federal commenting system, the average American鈥檚 voice is silenced by malicious, fraudulent, and duplicative noise. It鈥檚 past time to end this hacker鈥檚 paradise. By charging a nominal fee to post comments, lawmakers can restore these voices while simultaneously forgoing privacy and security concerns that would prove inevitable with alternative proposals.