“Sheer Technological Ineptitude”

Posted on April 10, 2008

Hey kids!

Remember back in August 2006, when Joe Lieberman’s campaign Web site crashed on the day of the Connecticut Democratic primary, and Lieberman’s campaign claimed that his opponent’s people had hacked their servers to knock them offline?

And remember how I told you that was bullshit, and that the real reason was most likely that Lieberman’s Web people were a bunch of doorknobs?

Well, the FBI investigated and concluded that I was right:

It seemed to be the ultimate political dirty trick of the digital age: crashing an opponent’s Web site on the eve of a primary election in order to disrupt an opponent’s last-minute efforts. Or so the campaign of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut charged in 2006 when its site crashed the day before the upset victory of the challenger, Ned Lamont, in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Lieberman still went on to win re-election in November as an independent. Then, in December 2006, the state attorney general and the United States attorney, in response to a Lieberman request for an investigation, reported that they had found no evidence of foul play.

Now an F.B.I. e-mail message from October 2006 has been disclosed, saying that its investigation — also in response to a request by the Lieberman camp — showed that it was not angry bloggers or Mr. Lamont’s insurgent campaign workers who rendered the site inaccessible, but sheer technological ineptitude…

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” [The Stamford Advocate] said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

“Overutilized and misconfigured”. Sounds a lot like what I wrote at the time:

Apparently Joe2006.com is hosted on an el cheapo shared hosting plan. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine that the site went down due to a simple spike in usage (it is primary day, and their primary is being closely watched across the country) rather than any malicious action.

Just Well Mixed: where you can read the stories that will appear in next year’s New York Times, today!