Connecticut Local Politics

The FBI has closed their investigation into Senator Lieberman’s primary day website crash:

A federal investigation has concluded that Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut’s heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign’s allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.
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“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack,” according to the e-mail.
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According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

“The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause,” the memo stated. “The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site. The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack.”

Shocking.

I’m sure apologies will be forthcoming from the Lieberman campaign:

NGUYEN: Yes, this is an interesting one. On the day of the Connecticut — it’s the Senate primary, Joe Lieberman says his web site has been hacked and that it’s causing major disruptions, not only with the web site but with his e-mail. And he blames his challenger, Ned Lamont, for causing these problems.

Let me just read you a statement from the Lieberman campaign, this from the campaign manager, saying, “For the past 24 hours, the Friends of Joe Lieberman’s web site and e-mail have been totally disrupted and disabled. We believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the U.S. attorney and will be filing formal complaints reflecting our concerns.”

Also goes on to say, “This type of dirty politics has been the staple of the Lamont campaign,” referring to Ned Lamont, the challenger, “from the beginning, from the nonstop personal attacks to the intimidation tactics and offensive displays to these coordinated efforts to disable our web site.”

After this web site was attacked, the Lieberman campaign called the Democratic state party chair and ask that the Lamont campaign call off its cyber allies.

Now, all of these claims, mind you, Kyra, coming from the Lieberman camp.
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Lieberman says Lamont is responsible for this web site attack, shutting down not only the web site but the e-mails. We’ll see if that’s true or not.

Today, I am lodging a formal complaint to ascertain whether or not any crimes or violations of law have occurred due to the total disruption and disability of the Joe Lieberman campaign website (www.joe2006.com) and email system, in particular over the past 24 hours, including today, Connecticut?s primary election day.
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It is the opinion of our host that what has occurred is neither natural nor done by normal site visitor volume.
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This seems to be part of a pattern of what I suspect to be criminal and other illegal conduct and I ask you to immediately review and investigate these actions.

[via email]

From Dan Gerstein:

“Their supporters are doing these [attacks], we’ve demanded they get them to stop and they refuse to do it“

From Sean Smith:

“If Ned Lamont has a backbone in his body, he will call on these people to cease and desist,” Smith said.
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“It is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters.”

“For the past 24 hours the Friends for Joe Lieberman’s website and email has been totally disrupted and disabled, we believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the US Attorney and the Connecticut Chief State’s Attorney and the campaign will be filing a formal complaint reflecting our concerns. The campaign has also notified the State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal for his review.”

“We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately. Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy.”

[via email]

Can you imagine that statement? “Ned Lamont today calls on Senator Lieberman’s staff to correctly configure their website, or, in the alternative, immediately cease and desist from sending too many emails.”

And from Marion Steinfels:

According to Lieberman’s campaign communications director, Marion Steinfels, “Yep, we’ve been hacked.”

“There’s a coordinated effort to overloaded our bandwith and that has brought down our website and our e-mail,” she said.

There was a lot of integrity impugned that day, with no evidence, and, ultimately, for no reason. Tim Tagaris’ email isn’t hard to find (neither are the emails of all the bloggers supporting Lamont), use it (them) to apologize.