It may be that Coleman's swan song will be "Send in the Clowns." Perhaps Minnesotans are now asking themselves, 'Why did we ever elect this hapless incompetent moron to a term in the United States Senate?'

Actually, this happened exactly because Coleman for Senate is dispensing wages in the form of salt.

The thing that is absolutely unbelievable is that they were storing the credit card information together with the CVV security codes (the three digits on the back of your card). This is irresponsible and prohibited by law.

I don't know what it is with Republican and Republican-lite Congressional critters. Back here in CT we had an experience with Lieberman's people when Lieberman's website crashed during election day and they tried to pin the blame on Lamont. I've seen since that both the CT AG's office and the FBI cleared Lamont's campaign, confirming Lieberman's problems were due to his own campaigns decision to go cheap on their site ISP. That was over two years ago and too many politicians don't seem to have learned the lesson. Just wait until Coleman's supporters sue the crap out out him.

The internet is crawling with stolen credit cards. Tens of millions of them. So don't be surprised if it's taken a few months for someone to get around to peddling them. (And a few months more, if the charges are small, for any victims to even notice.)

In cases of extreme negligence and breach of notification laws, I think that even the relatively small cost of canceling the old cards, reinstating and continuing payments and auditing the last several months of statements could lead to liability, especially if all online donors were certified as a class.

Maybe there is a Republican gene, & it is recessive on computer skills. Coleman & McCain & Holy Joe Lieberman (& Lieberman's leader, Karl Rove) never did get the hang of the internets.

A tangential point, but the post makes too much of the Pioneer Press having backed Coleman. This article comes from a news writer, while the people in the tank for Coleman are on the editorial board. They're the ones who reprint WSJ editorials and cite them as fact, like a wingnut posting on a blog. However, it looks like the news has been kept separate.

We need to distinguish between Coleman, his political team, and someone with insider information and/or knowledge of Coleman's actions. It seems unavoidable that the information was posted in an improper manner. Applying Occom's Razor, if someone wanted to play dirty tricks to benefit Coleman, they wouldn't make up a story about his team handling his donor's accounts in an inappropriate, stupid and possibly illegal manner that only makes Coleman look bad.
When Rove planted a bug in his own office, then accused the opponents of bugging his office (he installed a battery that would have only lasted for several hours, and when the bug was "found" it was still functional) it immediately cast doubt on his opponents. Not even the Republicans would try to spin a story that someone working for Franken broke into Coleman's computer system, and compiled a database of information that is not supposed to be saved at all, and then posted it on Coleman's site without proper protections, and then notified Coleman's donors to tell them to cancel their credit cards, after Coleman spent so much effort saving that data in the first place. That would be akin to Vitter intentionally making up the story of the diapers and prostitutes, and then leaking it (the story, not the diapers)to try to blame his opponents for the leak. Even if that worked, more people would remember the diapers than remembered the story was "fake."
The more likely scenario is that Coleman's team completely mishandled donor's confidential information, and when the story broke and pointed the finger at Coleman for both mishandling the info originally, then failing to both correct the problem and notify donors in January, they threw out the nearest shiny object by screaming, "Hackers!"
It is plausible that the breach was leaked by someone with Coleman insider information who is looking to catch the next Republican freighter, as Coleman's sinks, not to undermine Franken, but to damage Coleman in any future primary or attempts at advancement.

This brings up an interesting point; some people seem to believe that the 'hackers' should be prosecuted (word: it's not hacking if the data is in a publicly accessible area of a website). Meanwhile, what about the criminal negligence of the idiots who were responsible for securing the data?

Data theft has become a major crime issue, and usually the culprit is the corporation who failed to secure sensitive consumer data. Data crimes need to be investigated, and if it's found that industry-standard security procedures weren't followed, then there needs to be a fine, or even some form of criminal punishment.

Of course, i'm not holding my breath, since the technical level of Congress is around the level of 'teh Interweb is a series of tubes,' not to mention the howler monkey lobbyists that would be unleashed to oppose such a common-sense measure, however, this is something that is much more deep-seated and important than the foibles of Mayor Quimby's campaign.

One time, somebody "hacked" my wallet after I left it on the sidewalk. Then, these hackers called me up and told me that they had hacked my wallet and that I should be more careful. How dare they!

Isn't Joe Lieberman claiming it was Ned Lamont and his old campaign team that is behind all this?

Check out Adria Richards' website for more details:
http://butyoureagirl.com/2009/01/28/did-norm-coleman-fake-his-own-website-death/

She was involved in researching the "crash" in January, and took screen shots of the database and directory while it was available for public viewing. She offers her explanation in a video post. I'm not a techie, but my understanding of her explanation is that Coleman's office saved a backup of the website (to the directory?) (on the same website?) while transferring to a different server, rather than turning off the server or using a safer protocol for the exchange.

Perhaps there really was a hacker, one who compromised a poorly secured website and decided to make it's compromised nature as obvious as possible by storing a dump of the database in an obvious place. That doesn't change the fact that the site was poorly secured in the first place and stored information that it shouldn't have.

For example, even a double-firewalled site can have its database compromised via an SQL injection attack. The server itself might have been compromised via an unrepaired bug in apache or php and its configuration changed to make it's entire directory tree visible (perhaps even modifiable). Hackers do these things all the time, impressing each other with just how bad they pwned a site. And all too many sites are vulnerable because it's actually fairly hard to find a site admin who keeps up to date on the nature of the threat.

None of this excuses the obvious mistakes and omissions by the Coleman camp. But I've seen first-hand what a hacker can do, and see no reason to discount the claim that the Coleman site was hacked.

Norm is not much on practicing what he preaches:

Oh the Hypocrisy