"Hacking" Investigation update

Today I called Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's office and asked about the investigation into the alleged "hacking" incident that the Lieberman campaign claimed had shut down their website the night before the Primary back on August 7th.

When the Joe2006.com website first crashed, Lieberman's campaign loudly squawked that there was some foul play afoot. Then they proceeded to issue press releases and threats to possibly challenge the primary results because of this "coordinated attack" on their website.

Skeptics have proposed that the Joe2006 website crashed not due to any hack attack, but rather through the short-sighted lack of planning by Lieberman's staff, and their attempt to run the website on a server that had extremely limited bandwidth and couldn't handle the huge jump in traffic during the hours leading up to the primary.

Richard Blumenthal's office issued this press release:

Attorney General To Investigate Hacking Of Lieberman Campaign Web Site

August 8, 2006
"I have received a complaint from Sen. Lieberman's campaign asking my office to investigate the hacking of his campaign web site. I will investigate potential violations of anti-hacking provisions of our state computer crimes laws that are specifically within my jurisdiction. I will also work with the State Elections Enforcement Commission, and state and federal criminal authorities concerning possible violations of state election statutes, and federal election protections and other laws. We will seek civil and criminal penalties, where appropriate."

That's well and good. But it's been over TWO MONTHS since this investigation began, with absolutely no word on it's progress.

So today I contacted the AG's office, and found someone willing to speak off the record. Off the record didn't really matter, because he couldn't tell me much beyond the fact that the investigation is ongoing and they can't discuss it.

When I brought up the possibility that Lieberman's campaign may have used their poorly-maintained server crash as an opportunity to attack the Lamont campaign and it's supporters, and there has been no resolution of the situation, what would keep them from doing the same thing on election day in November? They tried to use their server crash as an excuse to attack Lamont's campaign and get plenty of media coverage for their campaign; and they got tons of national attention, without any proof of their charges.

In the interest of providing an environment where a FAIR election can be run, it would be very helpful for the AG's office to at the very least publish some preliminary findings in advance of November 7th.

I asked the AG's representative to keep me posted on any developments.