You might recall the great controversy in Connecticut from a few months ago, when Joe Lieberman's web site crashed the night before the Democratic primary (which he then lost). Lieberman's team was quick to accuse Ned Lamont, his challenger, of hacking Lieberman's site and email system. We wrote about it on August 8th, the day of the primary.

Today, Lamont and his supporters were cleared by the U.S. attorney's office of having anything to do with the incident.

Even though Lamont's team immediately denied any involvement and even offered to help fix the problem, Lieberman's staff was quick to accuse them of hacking the site. Some from the Lamont campaign speculated that Lieberman had failed to pay his bills. The Stamford Advocate reminds us of some of the rest of the ugliness:

A Lieberman campaign spokeswoman, Marion Steinfels, had called it a "coordinated effort to wreck our Web site and make us incapable of communicating with each other and our voters."

Visitors who tried to access Lieberman's site received a message calling on Lamont to "make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately."

Now, Lieberman won his Senate campaign and Lamont is cleared of any wrongdoing. Did the whole thing make any difference at all? "I think it was just a tiny blip on a very large radar screen," Lamont's campaign chairman George Jepson said.

Tags: hacking, lieberman, lamont

Campaigns & Elections | Stupid Net Tricks (Mistakes) | The Dark Side
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