In a recent case outlined by the Wall Street Journal today a new kind of identify theft seems to have creeped into the comments made on pending legislation in the US. Policies have a review period where members of the public can comment and it seems that some of the comments being made are not made by the people they purport to represent. This has happened before in only a few cases, but it needs to be stopped. Somebody is submitting comments in the name of leaders, in this case, two US Senators, and those comments do not reflect their position on the issue.
I have been on both sides of this, having to review those comments, and making them. When reviewing, we used to group the comments into categories and try to answer as many of them as we could with one comment, never checking to see that the comments were actually made by the people they were supposed to come from. I’m not sure I know how to do that in a reliable way. When making comments, one does not even think about trying to authenticate the comments to prove the source of them.
So, we get mostly lobbying firms who use the names of some of the people who are their associates submitting false comments. That part is not new. But, that also should not be as hard to identify, if someone really wanted to. It will be work, but it might be worth it to identify the source of some of this kind of nonsense. Randomly pick some policy project like net neutrality, get a contractor to look a the data on the submissions, and trace them back to the point of origin. If they are fake submissions, refer them to the Justice Department and let them figure out what the charges will be. It must be illegal.
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