FCC refuses to release text of more than 40,000 net neutrality complaints

Ajit Pai says there’s no net neutrality problem—but keeps complaints under wraps.

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[Mustachioed Copy Cat]

We note that Commission staff could have denied NHMC's FOIA request on its face as unreasonably burdensome under the FOIA. In order to release all 47,000 complaints to NHMC, Commission staff would have had to review and redact personally identifiable information from each one of those complaints, which would have been unreasonably burdensome. Rather than simply denying the FOIA request, however, the staff has worked diligently with NHMC to provide it with responsive information in a reasonable time frame, while still protecting the personally identifiable information of thousands of consumers. On June 20, 2017, Commission FOIA staff provided NHMC with approximately 1,000 responsive complaints. Consistent with an oral offer on July 5, 2017, staff made a written offer on July 14, 2017 to provide NHMC by September 1, 2017 an additional 2,000 complaints, the accompanying carrier responses, 1,500 related emails, and an Excel spreadsheet of all 47,000 complaint numbers and additional requested data fields.

Ah, the old Privacy Act chestnut.

Sorry, but I don't think redacting information that should have appeared in specific fields would be all that burdensome. Sounds like they've admitted to having the information in a form that makes conversion to Excel trivial, so CSV or whatever. From there, you just highlight the Name column and hit delete.

...and that's assuming there is a Privacy Act expectation in filling out information in order to make a public comment. This isn't a record of your trips into or out of the country, or your medical records. This is information you provided to a public entity for the purposes of public comment. I don't know that the Privacy Act applies.

And it seems like the Privacy Act is the only reason why they couldn't release the information in total. Its an easy fallback for FOIA-subject agencies that don't want to produce.