Paranoia, incompetence, or a dirty trick: Lieberman's DOS allegations

Today, the Lieberman campaign irresponsibly accused Lamont supporters of hacking their website. By its own admission, the campaign had no evidence of any wrongdoing by its opponents. In fact, they don't know the site was hacked at all.

So, why doesn't Lieberman's website work? Some people on the Lamont team speculated that the Lieberman campaign defaulted on its internet bill. In fact, it's more likely that the website went down because of a surge in legitimate primary day traffic. The Lieberman is campaign fully paid up on their measly fifteen bucks a month ISP hosting. Kos explains:

But now I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman's site went down.

They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.

Here's the deal -- you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn't need that much bandwidth, but if you're paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin' cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don't go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out.

For their part, the Lamont campaign has offered its technical expertise to get Lieberman's site back up (which could be done in an hour by a competent sysadmin), and has added a link to the googlecached version of Lieberman's site at the top of their blog.

Lieberman should apologize to Lamont and his supporters. Lieberman's aides accused Lamont supporters of a federal crime on primary day. More likely, the Lieberman campaign has only itself to blame for its current predicament. What kind of buffoons buy fifteen bucks worth of bandwidth for a multi-million dollar campaign's website for the month of the biggest primary in America? Would you trust that team to know the difference between a DOS attack and a blown fuse?

These frivolous accusations on election day are despicable and they stink of desperation.

Comments

[John Lucid]

Someone must be hacking your site, Lindsay, because the comment counter on your previous post says "0" when it is obviously more than that.

I blame Ned, or possibly a wild-eyed Kossack moonbat supporter of Ned. Either way, it's a crazy Lamontnik's fault. I have no proof whatsoever to substantiate these allegations, but I'm going to file a criminal complaint and contact every major media outlet and go public with this anyway. It's the least I can do for the democratic process.

[togolosh]

I find this enormously entertaining. We're incompetent, but it's the other guy's fault. No wonder he's so chummy with Bush.

[Alon Levy]

Remember my earlier prediction that Lieberman would accuse Lamont of voter fraud if Lamont won in a close race... it seems more and more likely to be true.

[Lawrence Krubner]

If I recall right, Lindsay, you pay $12 a month for this weblog and its bandwidth, yet you actually use a bit more than that in terms of bandwidth. This blog, important as it is, of course gets no where near the traffic that Lieberman's site must get on primary day. Yet they are paying about the same amount. Incredible. Really.

[The Continental Op]

Even sleazier than the accusation itself is Lieberman's characterization of the supposed hacking as "Rovian tactics". What a putz.

[TomK]

Looks like Liberman has run out of Jomentum

[DJA]

The race is still too close to call, but Alon has already won his bet with the Phantom:

Through the afternoon, Lieberman advisers complained bitterly over the collapse of its Web site, which they blamed on unnamed “political opponents.”

Yet it was not clear who was at fault. The advisers said they had no evidence implicating the Lamont campaign and could not explain the precise nature of the problem, except to say that the campaign server’s bandwidth had been overwhelmed. Lamont aides and Internet bloggers who oppose Mr. Lieberman, however, said the problem appeared to be that the campaign did not spend enough money to host a Web site that could handle high traffic.

Mr. Lieberman’s campaign manager, Sean Smith, said the online blackout was tantamount to voter suppression, because it disabled e-mail and left aides without a tool to communicate with tens of thousands of supporters on primary day.

Mr. Smith said the campaign would file a formal complaint asking state and federal legal authorities to investigate.

So c'mon, Phantom. Be a man and pony up.

[DJA]

Oh, look, now FireDogLake is down. It's clearly Joe's fault.

[Ted Powell]

Mr. Lieberman’s campaign manager, Sean Smith, said the online blackout was tantamount to voter suppression, because it disabled e-mail and left aides without a tool to communicate with tens of thousands of supporters on primary day.

What a clueless wonder! Was the only copy of their mailing list stored on the ISP's server? Did none of the aides have a personal email account that still worked?

Incidentally, at 4:05 EDT, I sent a test email to webmaster@joe2006.com, and it was accepted within two seconds, according to my mail server log.

[johnieb]

This always read as what it so obviously is, a sleazy rumor by a desperate loser seeking to influence the gullible. Sad.

[Lawrence Krubner]

I'm not sure if this is a dead issue or not. It may become crucial the next time there is a server melt-down during a major campaign. Is there any chance that the Lamont campaign would release traffic statistics regarding its web server? I assume the Lieberman team will never release statistics regarding the traffic their web server got on campaign day. But if the Lamont campaign released its traffic numbers, we could make intelligent guesses about how much traffic the Lieberman server took before the account was shut off. I suspect that the Lieberman web server was at least 2 orders of magnitude shy of what it needed to be. A small music studio I work with pays $1,500 a month for 3 servers from Rackspace. And I suspect Lieberman on campaign day got a lot more traffic than the music studio. Kos mentions that he spends $7,000 a month on bandwidth. I'd believe that the Lieberman site had more traffic than Kos on campaign day, but it would be nice to have some numbers. I think we could reasonably assume a very rough equality between the Lamont site and the Lieberman site, at least to give us a sense of which order of magnitude is under discussion. So it would be nice if someone on the Lamont team let go some numbers.