It's a political blow to a campaign we haven't seen before in the Internet era. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's web site came to a screeching halt today due to what he thinks may be "criminal and other illegal conduct." The question is -- was www.joe2006.com the victim of a deliberate attack by supporters of his political rival, or did it crash for other reasons.

As Mark Davis reported at 6:00, Lieberman's campaign started losing the their e-mail and web site Monday night. By this morning it was toast. Campaign workers couldn't e-mail each other. They couldn't e-mail supporters.

Lieberman's campaign called it an attack by supporters of Ned Lamont. For sure Lamont has found plenty of support in the blogosphere, and a few blogs, like MyDD.com have taken issue with Lieberman's claim that he was attacked.

Lamont's own blog had claimed that the site went down because Lieberman didn't pay his bill, something flatly denied by the web site host. Lamont also denies having anything to do with the outage. Another blog offers its own explaination of Why Lieberman's site is down, saying "it's down because they were too cheap to pay for quality hosting."

I spoke with Dan Geary, who hosts Lieberman's site, and asked him about the outage. He said they have been "dodging torpedoes" for more than a month, and said this was "obviously a malicious attack" and that whoever did it "they are very good at it."

Geary explained a lot more in an e-mail to the Lieberman campaign, which forwarded the explaination to the attorney general and U.S. Attorney. Since they shared it with us, we'll share it with you.

DESCRIPTION FROM MR. DAN GEARY, dated Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:12 PM

Here's what we know at this point:

--Mid-morning eastern time; the domain, www.joe2006.com and its accompanying email server experienced a massive increase in queries; effectively preventing display of the site and cutting-off critical Email communication to over 80 Lieberman campaign staff in the campaign's various offices and in the field. A server query, more or less, is a request to read the files that make up and display a website and its functions and to find an email address to deliver to.

--Re-starting the server would result in a short period of stable traffic followed by a rapid increase to redlining the system.

--There has been no major changes to the content of the site, nor any measurable increase in staff communications via Email between yesterday and today that would account for the massive load to the server.

--After a day of continuous clearing and re-starting the server, six or seven times I think, we performed a test to see if the overload was simply a very large number of site visitors using the various features, including the video sections which use a large amount of bandwidth. The test was to simply place a blank white page as the home page and make the site live again. With this, no site visitor going to www.joe2006.com would have been able to use the features of the site, including the video players. The load on the server from the website still immediately redlined.

--So for the site to overload naturally by a large number of people looking at a blank, white page (about a 16k size file on the web server) it would have to be visited simultaneously by so many visitors it seems improbable.

--We then disabled every file of the website including the content-management system, leaving a maintenance message. That stabilized the system so that the campaign's volunteers and staff could communicate with each other and the campaign could respond to emails from Connecticut residents, inquiries by the press, etc.

--We are going to start re-enabling the website's features one-by-one to see which files or features are being queried over and over to the point of crashing the website, and compare with server logs to try and determine what the exact cause of this is. We are not internet security experts; most firms like that are staffed with ex police, FBI types.

--Additionally, we also know that approximately a month ago, the website was attacked and de-faced twice, by an assailant that replaced the home page with a message that read: We own you site. ThHacker. A determined hacker is very difficult to thwart. We took measures to hopefully prevent the de-facing again; only to find ourselves in this situation the day before the election. The hacker in the previous attack used a process called SQL (pronounced "sequel") Injection to enter the site?s file system and replace the home page. The hacker additionally left a Trojan virus file behind; which we have isolated and on file.

--Once we have the site live and whatever features/functions that have the massive server load identified and isolated. We will transfer the site, yet again, without interruption on Email to a brand-new, never-been-used server there to reside by itself as an additional layer of security.

--For this to have been an occurrence that was natural and done by site visitor volume seems very, very unlikely to us.

You may not believe what Geary or anyone else says. With all things, the truth is somewhere in the middle of the extremes. I just find it a fascinating story no matter who is right.