• by Shankar Gupta , August 9, 2006

Some political observers have said that the Democratic primary battle between Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman and victorious challenger Ned Lamont is the first real test of the political power of the blogosphere, with much of Lamont's fiercest support coming from left-wing bloggers.

But in its final days, the race also began to represent one of the Internet's potential pitfalls, as the Web site supporting Lieberman's campaign went dark.

It wasn't clear as of Tuesday whether the outage was caused by a political opponent's deliberate attack or a simple technological malfunction, but the result was that Lieberman's campaign lost its Web site, Joe2006.com, in the final hours of a hotly contested primary.

The sudden outage--analogous to an e-commerce site collapsing the week before Christmas--appeared to throw the campaign into turmoil in its last day. The crash also might have hurt Lieberman at the polls, suggested Democratic political consultant Michael Bassik. "There are so many voters who rely on the Web for information," Bassik said. "I'm sure it could be argued that if this race comes down to the wire, this could've been an important factor," he said Tuesday, before the results were known. Lamont ultimately won the race by a margin of more than 3 points.

Lieberman's campaign alleged earlier in the day Tuesday that the Web site outage was due to a denial of service attack. While the Lieberman camp hasn't blamed anyone specifically, the theory appears to be that one of Lamont's Web-savvy supporters flooded the server with requests--such as for pictures or specific pages--until the site would no longer load. Dan Gerstein, a senior advisor to the Lieberman campaign, said the outage was caused by someone in the "netroots" community--the name given to grassroots supporters online.

Gerstein added that the campaign will file a complaint with state and federal attorneys general. "This is classic voter suppression tactics. It started yesterday morning, the two biggest days before the election, and we have no ability to communicate with the outside world electronically," he said. "This is the third coordinated effort to disable our Web site. This is coming from someone in the netroots," he said. "The Lamont campaign is a creature of the netroots. They are part of his campaign. At a minimum, we believe that the Lamont campaign has an obligation to denounce this attack and aggressively communicate to their online supporters in the larger netroots community that they don't approve of this tactic, and they want it to stop."

The Lamont camp issued a statement on Tuesday condemning the hacking of Web sites. "If Senator Lieberman's website was indeed hacked, we had absolutely no part in it, denounce the action, and urge whoever is responsible cease and desist immediately. It is our sincerest wish that everyone planning to vote for Ned Lamont or Joe Lieberman does so today," wrote Tim Tagaris, director of Internet communications for the Lamont campaign, in a blog post.

Meanwhile, bloggers supporting challenger Ned Lamont claim that the site outage was due only to bandwidth trouble at the net host for Lieberman's campaign, which appears to be run by MyHostCamp.com.