I have ALOT of experience in the area of designing highly available and scalable IT systems across a variety of platforms (20+ years) across a variety of industries including banking, advertising, finance, legal and automotive industries.
When a system underperforms to the point of becoming UN-USABLE, there are a number of questions to ask, including:
1. Was it designed to perform at a defined, acceptable level under anticipated peak loads? If you know you're going to have a maximum of 40,000 people using a system at peak load, you design the system to be scalable so that if 40,000 or more users are using it, it has available capacity. That means either that capacity is online all the time, or can be brought to bear quickly during peak utilization periods, thus the next question.
2. Have all single points of failure been eliminated, and can additional capacity to bear quickly if needed to maintain performance? (And then, how will that capacity be brought online quickly?)
If questions 1 and 2 (and their related questions) above were not properly addressed, it can certainly appear that a system has been compromised because it largely has - by its own flawed design. It's really only after eliminating these two questions that one can reasonably ask "has the system been compromised/hacked?"
I wasn't a user of the system, my best guess with the information available is that it simply became un-usable due to peak demand and the Romney Campaign's IT Staff didn't have a plan to bring additional capacity online quickly enough to maintain a proper service level for the users of the system.
As reporters sometimes say, "the story is too good to check."
Do you think that the Romney people hired systems design people so incompetent that they didn’t analyze and account for the peak requirements in a system specifically intended to handle a very time-sensitive and bulky load requirement?
Realize that I am saying this as a person who has learned that when I’m working on a critical issue I EXPECT my computer to fail. I have back-up means specifically to handle that situation because I have experienced it so many times. Word goes to a crawl every time I am working on a critical post for my blog or some legal document - this last time because a file had code (and apparently looping scripts) added to it which doubled the size so that Word and Outlook Express couldn’t handle it well. Wordpress won’t upload my files. Emails disappear. My anti-virus program is disabled. The latest thing was when Word wouldn’t let me save my documents as PDF’s, which is the format I need to use to post to Wordpress. I didn’t do anything to my computer to impact it one way or another, but after a couple weeks Word suddenly decided to let me save PDF’s again. I store files externally so they won’t get lost when my computer is trashed. I have the mechanisms in place to retrieve what was left on my computer when it is trashed - which I’ve had to use twice now.
Those of us who have observed the Obama regime’s sabotage first-hand are prepared for these things. If Romney’s designers were just using the standard precautions they would get blown away, simply because they didn’t know who and what they were up against.
That’s the background I’m speaking from, and there are others here who have learned the same things as I have. Until the “cool” people learn to listen to what people like me have learned, they will always underestimate the enemy and find themselves unprepared to handle what is thrown at them. There is a reason that Alinsky wants to marginalize the “conspiracy theorists”: because if people took the watchdogs seriously they would lock their doors instead of being eaten alive by the wolves.
If anybody in the political establishment wants a fighting chance at saving this country, they need to stop blowing Alinsky libel out their rear ends so they can be “cool” like the media, and start listening instead.