With a new lawsuit this week, the New York Times Co. has joined others in demanding the Federal Communications Commission, led by Republican chairman Ajit Pai, to stop stonewalling and come clean about the failures of the agency’s commenting system during last year’s fight over net neutrality rules.
The effort to force the FCC to hand over internal documents and data by the suit’s plaintiffs, including NYT report Nicholas Confessore and investigations editor Gabriel Dance, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Thursday. The lawsuit claims Pai’s commission has “thrown up a series of roadblocks” to prevent the newspaper from obtaining records which its journalists first requested in the summer of 2017.
While Pai originally claimed that the commenting system came under attack by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, it was only recently—after an internal report refuted his narrative—that he finally admitted his claims were false.
Click Here: All Blacks Rugby Jersey
According to Bloomberg, the New York Times lawsuit is, “seeking data, including IP addresses, time stamps and the FCC’s internal web server logs, linked to public comments submitted to the agency.”
Last week, responding to a separate FOIA request that ended up in court after the FCC refused to comply, a federal judge ruled on behalf of freelance journalist Jason Prechtel who also wanted access to the information related to the commenting system.
As Ars Technica reported:
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT