In general submitting comments on a government action is completely visible to everyone.
As a favor to a colleague I once did some data-analysis for public comments. She just shipped me everyone's data. I asked if that was legal and was told that she was required to give it to anyone who asks.
This feels weird for a web-comment BBS, but it's totally normal for the government requesting comments on policy.
Yeah, looks that way. Putting my name on protecting the internet is something I'm proud to do. Putting my address down is a bit obnoxious though - I doubt they're going to do any verification on these.
They don't have to. If anyone wants to, they could verify it. I helped support an effort to find evidence of astroturfing an FCC request for comment. Having this data enabled us to do that work.
Knowing that the data could be verified is supposed to be a deterrent to acting in bad faith. Later, one could do the verification if they doubted the comments were genuine. Given the amount of tech power behind keeping net-neutrality, we should want the process to be as open as possible, so we could verify it ourselves.
Making things public is how the government gets data closer to the truth with less work, and you don't have to trust them to do it. Groups with interest do the verification (lobbyists, journalists, you, etc). This is part of what makes democracy work.
The alternative is that we have to trust the government to do the verification with no check or balance.
