Astroturfed Net Neutrality Letter Still Shrouded in Mystery

Last week, I wrote here at BigGovernment about Ben Scott, Policy Director for the liberal advocacy group Free Press, being outed as the true author of a pro-net neutrality letter supposedly written by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA).

Soon after, The Hill’s technology blog “Hillicon Valley” ran a story with an explanation from Inslee’s staff:

“But Inslee’s office told Hillicon Valley on Tuesday that Scott did not, in fact, draft the letter on behalf of the congressman. Rather, as Inslee’s staff scrambled to put out something last week in support of the FCC’s goals, it consulted old documents and industry talking points for ideas. A staff member ultimately typed the new letter on top of the Word document that Free Press previously sent Inslee — the date of which was May 7 — meaning the meta-data still reflected Scott as its author.”

At first glance, this sounds halfway plausible. While I’m not an expert on meta-data as it relates to documents like this, my understanding is that it’s possible that writing over top of another person’s original document could lead to a situation where the content is attributable to one person (or organization) while the meta-data suggests authorship by another. This led me to a couple of questions. Did the National Journal, which originally reported the story, get it wrong? Did Inslee’s office legitimately make a mistake by overwriting talking points from Free Press with their own letter, leading to this confusion? Was I, then, wrong to point out the potential conflict associated with a group that decries “astroturfing” allegedly writing a letter for a Member of Congress? To help answer those questions, I decided to reach out to Representative Inslee’s office directly to clarify exactly what happened. The result was…not encouraging.

I asked Inslee’s Communications Director, the person quoted by The Hill, if he’d be willing to publicize the May 7th letter that was mistakenly overwritten in order to prove that its contents differed significantly from the letter that was ultimately made public with his boss’ signature. He responded thusly:

“As I have told news outlets, we are the author of the letter. There is no question that Jay has a long history on this subject, in fact just a couple of weeks ago he penned a widely distributed op-ed in the Seattle Times.

In the end the letter isn’t the issue, just a cynical ploy to keep the media from talking about what is at stake here.”

In other words, they refuse to make the document public. Perhaps they’d just like this story to go away. Or perhaps the talking points they received on May 7th from Ben Scott at Free Press look suspiciously like the letter bearing Representative Inslee’s name. In the interest of full disclosure, here’s my full exchange with his staffer (with only personalized contact information removed). To the staffer’s credit, he did give me permission to quote the email interchange, so they aren’t completely stonewalling.

Meanwhile, in the days since the article first appeared , we’ve heard not a peep about it from Free Press or Ben Scott . Unless I’ve missed it, there’s been no official response and Ben Scott himself seems to have gone on radio silence. He was strangely absent from the agenda at Free Press’ big summit, where he was featured prominently last year. So the question is, Where’s Ben? See if you can find him in the picture below!