What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”? (from Jacobin)

[drokhole]

What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”? (Jacobin)

The definitive explanation of the Democratic National Committee’s “Datagate” scandal and what the mainstream media got wrong.
by Björn Westergard

Last Wednesday morning around 10:40 AM, NGP VAN, the company whose software hosts the Democratic National Committee’s voter file, released a routine software update. The update introduced a bug that allowed members of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, among others, to filter the voter records they share using “scores” they do not share (about which more shortly). For the next hour or so, members of Sanders’ staff ran twenty-five searches using scores generated by the Clinton campaign; their intentions in doing so are now the subject of heated dispute. By noon, NGP VAN staff were aware of the issue and had taken steps to fix it.

By Friday, the DNC — which brokers access to VAN/VoteBuilder and mediates disputes between its users — went public with the story and ordered NGP VAN to deny the Sanders campaign access. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook accused the Sanders campaign of deliberately stealing data to gain a competitive edge. The Sanders campaign fired its data director, Josh Uretsky, and Uretsky, taking full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, insisted they had only intended to document the problem. Hoping for an injunction to regain access, the Sanders camp sued the DNC in federal court.

By Friday evening, the DNC had given the go-ahead for access to be restored, and by Saturday morning it had been. As a practical matter, the story ends here. But recriminations continue.

I was a software developer for NGP VAN from the summer of 2011 through the spring of 2015, having first heard of the company as a volunteer in the 2008 Obama primary campaign. While at NGP VAN, I contributed to a system through which the scores at the center of this dispute can be loaded into the voter file. The Voter Activation Network (“the VAN”), which the DNC brands as “VoteBuilder,” is also employed by foreign political parties, the AFL-CIO, NGOs, and — surprisingly, for a brief period in 2013 — Uber.

Amusing as it’s been to find that some of the technical minutiae of my old job has become a hot topic of conversation, coverage of the story so far has been tendentious and often plainly inaccurate. The Clinton campaign has exploited the obscurity of the software and the institutional context in which it’s used to grossly mischaracterize the actions of Sanders staffers. That said, Uretsky’s statements of intent do not accord with the logs released by NGP VAN.

more at the link

[Gothmog]

1. Interesting article

The Sanders campaign had access to proprietary information showed the strategy and thinking of the Clinton plan for its GOTV efforts in key states. This was not a harmless exercise and the information accessed could hurt the Clinton campaign

[artislife]

12. How could this "harm" the Clinton campaign?

I get that was a breach in the firewall. I get that Sanders team saw Clinton's data on donors. But what could Sanders do with that data that would harm Clinton's team? Honestly, this is a question. Could he then solicit monies from those donors? Ones, that probably have heard of him and still chosen to donate to Clinton's campaign?


That seems to be the only thing Bernie's team could do with this information, or am I missing something?

I understand that it is not on, that they shouldn't do it, but is that the worse case scenario from all of this?

Honestly, this is a real question, not snark. You are very well known as a Clinton supporter and I think you could tell me the fears of what could be done with this breach. You seem less excitable than a few on the board and I would be inclined to believe what you post.

[drokhole]

15. That seems to be the author's conclusion...

That, at best, the Sanders team would identify which areas to exclude from their efforts/canvassing walks (the "strong" Hilary supporters), and to get a general litmus of what the Clinton campaign thought their chances were (if I'm reading it right). His words:

"But {Uretsky's} actions were less comparable to copying sheets from the opposing team’s playbook than opportunistic eavesdropping on its pre-game chatter."

[newthinking]

17. He mentioned they could not even get that detail without being able to download the data

and the author mentions that actually getting use out of it outside the system would take months of work and would basically be impossible to do fast enough to benefit a campaign..

Other than potentially being able to get an idea of the Clinton campaign' confidence level there was really nothing else that could be gained through what was saved in the system.

[drokhole]

20. Agreed

I'm also a little more than uncomfortable with acting as if citizens are somehow a specific candidate's/campaign's "customer." I understand there's time, effort, and money expended in gathering the data, but still...

[JDPriestly]

36. Nonsense. The strategy and thinking of the Clinton GOTV efforts is probably pretty obvious

to the Bernie campaign without viewing those files.

There was not enough time for the Bernie campaign to learn much about Hillary's strategies.

I saw the list of searches, and my first thought was that they were intended to show the existence of the breach of the firewall and the extent of that breach.

That's all. And the information is back in Hillary's file.
I am inclined to believe Uretsky's explanation of his conduct.

If I had been in his place and had wanted to exploit that opportunity to study Hillary's files, I would have done it quite differently so that less of a history was left.

I suspect that Hillary's campaign is a lot weaker than Uretsky or the Bernie campaign even thought possible. You don't need to look at a database to know that. You just look at the crowd numbers in Iowa. Bernie is getting crowds many times the sizes of Hillary's crowds.

Hillary is desperate and trying to make a big deal out of this breach knowing that people don't understand what happened.

Hillary supporters are trying to spread as much misinformation and innuendo regarding what happened as possible.

It is disgusting and will backfire.

I hope Bernie insists on a court-appointed referee and investigator to determine what really happened. Uretsky can testify under oath if need be.

[Gothmog]

55. Sanders spins the facts when he says campaign did not 'go out and take' Clinton data

Here are some facts for the Sanders supporters to ignore or not be able to understand http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/22/bernie-s/Sanders-take-Clinton-voter-data/

"We didn't go out and take" information from the Hillary Clinton campaign.
— Bernie Sanders on Sunday, December 20th, 2015 in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press".

.....But in an interview the next day on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd pressed Sanders on exactly what happened when a software glitch allowed his people to see some of the Clinton data. The system is run by the Democratic National Committee, and the DNC had temporarily blocked the Sanders campaign from using its valuable voter information.

"As a result of a breach caused by the DNC vendor, not by us, information came into our campaign about the Clinton campaign," Sanders said Dec. 20, 2015.

"Magically," asked Todd?

"We didn't go out and take it," Sanders replied.

Really? In this fact-check, we’ll explore whether the Sanders campaign staff didn’t "go out and take" information from the Clinton campaign......

Thanks to a leak of the activity logs on the NGP VAN system, we have some idea. The Twitter user Iowa Starting Line posted them and you can see those logs here. No one has questioned their authenticity. Here’s one example:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_jK82EMXBfkYtoQ0iJKshtsrxkVhEPtoHtLunkk6XnB1JzMXDXWSNqyXGOK6l4vJ4-We23G4ziOmHwD18SA5emNm63Wuft1aEGugG3Gk5mGf7T-wDLzfs5z3S8uFbU4DMYP8_LVG
These logs show Sanders people spent a bit under two hours in the data. During that time, they called up information from about a dozen states. They queried the database for the number of voters who met certain criteria. The "Turnout" variable shows on a scale of 1 to 100 how likely a person is to vote. A voter with a high "Priority" score would be someone the campaign will make every effort to contact.....

Our ruling

Sanders said that his campaign did not go out and take information from the Clinton campaign. From all accounts, it is true that the Sanders campaign did not attempt to break into the voter data of a rival campaign. The Sanders people stumbled upon a glitch.

But rather than reporting the glitch immediately, they probed the database for a bit under two hours. At some point, the staff produced a page of information that at the very least would show the count of certain voters.

Experts familiar with the Democratic voter data base say that the Sanders campaign would have gleaned valuable information. At the end of the day, they knew some things about the Clinton campaign that they hadn’t known before, even if they didn’t seek to crack into the Clinton data.

We rate Sanders’ claim that the campaign didn’t "go out and take" information as Mostly False.

The facts show that the Sanders campaign did take proprietary information.

[Thinkingabout]

2. So it is the Clinton campaign has exploited the software, now could this

Be explained on how the Clinton Campaign has exploited the software.

On the other hand, what was the intent of Uretsky, it would sound more reasonable Uretsky exploited the software and breached Clinton Campaign data.

Twisting the truth could be the attempted exploitation. After the report is announced by the audit then everyone can put this to sleep.

[grasswire]

5. is that the new talking point?

"time to put this to sleep"

[Thinkingabout]

37. According to the OP, thought it was strange myself.

[LiberalArkie]

6. I think it is exactly like he said. He wanted to be able to prove that the breach had occurred.

Because when it happened in October he had no proof that it happened. He knew it had because he could see Clintons scores in his results. He knew it was probably also occurring the other way around. Van and DNC would not believe him with out proof. He created the proof and left it on the DNC's servers. VAN stated that Sanders group did not export it. It stayed on the servers as proof that the breach had happened.

As someone who has dealt with large systems before, the vender does NOT believe the customer when a problem has occurred. The customer has to prove to the vender that something has happened. Usually the customer has to give the vender a step by step list of actions that the customer did to achieve the error.

[Voice for Peace]

9. ++++

Fully agree.
🌟💥🌟

[JDPriestly]

32. I agree. We are talking about computer nerds here. They will mess with data just to see

what they can do.

That's my experience anyway.

He was testing the parameters. He did a lot of quick searches in a relatively short period of time. You don't really learn that much from it. But it does prove the existence of the capacity to access the entire database and measures the extent of Bernie's ability to access Hillary's information.

The time frame was too short to really get much specific information. And Uretsky knew that NGP Van would have the history of his searches.

But the damage has been done.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who, without understanding what happened made so much over this and damaged Bernie's campaign with her over-reacting, needs to resign. And now.

An apology from Wasserman-Schultz is in my opinion not sufficient.

She capitalized on this glitch which was the fault of the vendor she selected -- NGP Van.

[Thinkingabout]

38. Maybe he can use this for his defense.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

14. Clinton camp circling the wagons ...

Is Bernie still suing the DNC? I hope so.

[Thinkingabout]

39. Nope, not circling the wagons, just waiting for the audit results.

[newthinking]

18. The author, formerly and admin of the software, said that neither campaign could get far without

doing much more than was done by Uretsky.

So indeed, if nothing more was done by either side it should be put to sleep.

The problem is that this is being handled for political gain. So I would fully expect that common sense will not prevail if there is an opportunity to exploit the public's understanding further.

[JDPriestly]

34. We've discussed this before.

Please read the article and the NGP Van blog on their website.

I believe based on my experience with databases that Uretsky is telling the truth. He knew his searches would leave a history, a trace. If he had wanted to glean information, he would not have done so many searches so quickly and filed them away. That's not how you get much useful information from a database.

This is strictly the fault of NGP Van and may be (I haven't seen the contract) a breach of contract by them. I don't know this for a fact, but in a normal business contract, NGP Van's duty to maintain the separation, the firewall between Hillary's and Bernie's information would be there in print, in black and white, or in the computer equivalent of a contract.

[Thinkingabout]

40. I was commenting on the OP, perhaps responding to the OP where

Your concerns could be answered.

[JDPriestly]

42. If you are talking about the Kroll audit, don't count on it.

The searches Urestsky did sure looked like they were intended to determine the extent of the breach and prove the existence of the breach.

Do you have experience using a large database?

My experience is with a much smaller database than all the voters in a number of states.

The data Uretsky viewed for a short time was of virtually no value to the Bernie campaign.

As for exposing Hillary's strategy, that would not be necessary. It's pretty obvious from the crowd numbers that Hillary is not doing nearly as well in Iowa as she claims.

This situation looks to me like it COULD HAVE BEEN a trap set by the DNC and the vendor chosen by the DNC to make the Bernie campaign look bad. It could also have been a set-up so that Hillary's campaign could view specific information from Bernie's portion of the website. No searches would have been necessary to do that, I suspect. (Don't know for sure but the website was probably open with no firewall up for either campaign. What was Hillary's campaign doing during the time period of the breach? That question also has to be answered. Just because they weren't doing specific searches to measure the extent of the breach does not mean they weren't looking. Was every view of every bit of information on the website tracked? I seriously doubt it but it is possible. What does the history tell us was going on on Hillary's side of the database during the breach?)

A really independent review and investigation is needed of this.

The Clinton campaign and the DNC have milked every bit of anti-Bernie propaganda out of this COMPUTER BUG-caused incident possible.

To us Bernie supporters, this is not over by a long-shot.

It's a shame that the DNC and the Hillary campaign tried to exploit it to make Bernie look bad. That's really a miserable, under-handed thing to do.

A lot of Hillary supporters really think that Bernie's campaign "stole" information from Hillary.

The DNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz need to apologize and then Debbie needs to resign.

Otherwise this could divide the Democratic Party irreparably insofar as the 2016 campaign is concerned.

Bernie fired an employee over this. The DNC needs to fire Debbie over her handling of it.

We are waiting.

[Thinkingabout]

43. All of this does not excuse the fact the breach occurred.

[JDPriestly]

49. The breach is the fault of NGP Van. They admit there was a bug in a release on the website.

They admit the breach was their fault.

Just read the blog on the NGP Van website.

It's all there.

[Thinkingabout]

50. The NGP Van was nkt fired by Sanders. Who forced Sanders staff members to look at Clinton's

Data? This may sound reasonable to some people, the staff members breached the Data.

[JDPriestly]

51. The staff did not breach the data. They were given permission to search and view the data

and they searched.

I have explained my view. That is all I have to say about it.

Thank you.

We will have to agree to disagree.

[Thinkingabout]

53. Wow.

[Thinkingabout]

52. Did Sanders fire one of his staff members and suspend two more?

The breach was by the staff members, the ability to do so may be on NGP Van allowing a window but the breach was not by NPG Van. Some may want to deny responsibility of the staff members breaching the data. Who forced these staff members to breach the data?

[SusanCalvin]

3. Very interesting, thanks.

I'd still like to know exactly what was "another system" in October.

[grasswire]

4. The document has been pulled from the Internet!!

Does anyone have another way of getting it??

[LiberalArkie]

7. I am still getting it

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data-breach-president-debate/

[grasswire]

8. not me

doesn't come up from your link or from the link in OP

[SusanCalvin]

10. It's still there for me. nt

[JonLeibowitz]

11. ditto. n/t

[bvf]

45. Yep, still there. n/t

[underthematrix]

13. I just read the article and shared it on Twitter and Facebook

Very interesting read.

[newthinking]

16. This basically shows the analysis by myself and another IT admin was correct. This is POLITICAL not

substantive.

My previous posted analysis:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251913752


This "crisis" was mostly (somewhat dishonest) political gamesmanship.


The summary basically states that:

1. The data pulled had little if any feasible real campaign use.

2. There is *no* "data to be recovered" and there was no way to "download" it in the first place. This is just made up.

3. It is consistent that Uretsky's searches began as an investigation, but it appears he got carried away and possibly did attempt to use the data to determine the Clinton campaign's confidence level. So it was right to fire him for crossing the line.

[drokhole]

21. Great OP!

[Jarqui]

23. Going off the summary of the log they provided

Last edited Thu Dec 24, 2015, 09:22 PM - Edit history (1)

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/12/18/merged_document.pdf

I feel similarly with one technical exception. NGP VAN said Uretsky's group ran and exported one summary report (arguably to prove that they could do it). But that is similar to the "eaves dropping" he's talking about. They didn't get Clinton voter data fields or copies of those lists or anything else. They saw a bit of how the Clinton team currently perceived their data but have no knowledge of how much confidence the Clinton team had in it, etc. The difference is there's no political BS in that data.

The one correction that I would make to #3 is Uretsky was on the phone with his supervisors during the breach. He'd also be in discussions with his team. So he would be likely to be pounding away on the keyboard for the whole time. We see a user create other users (that's probably Uretsky). That person had two 10-11 minute sessions in four states looking at different fields in the states. That mirrored what Urestsky said he was doing.

I suspect one of the more junior people, maybe a data entry person, just did what Uretsky asked but Uretsky was running around chatting with his supervisors and others so they were left to just doing whatever they could think of and that resulted in less moving around or could be perceived as digging in and pounding. But I feel strongly that there's no way that was Uretsky.

[JDPriestly]

29. I tend to believe Uretsky's statement about his intent to document the extent of the breach

in order to protect Bernie's information.

What do you think about that?

Bernie's campaign had experienced a previous breach on a different website that it complained about to the DNC. It seems logical to me that they would run searches to discover and determine the extent of the data available due to the NGP Van "bug" which might constitute a breach of contract if not worse.


I haven't seen the contract but it probably required NGP Van to protect the proprietary data of the Bernie and Hillary campaigns from the view of the opposing campaign. I would guess that.

I am inclined to believe Uretsky. He knew very well that a log was being kept of the searches. And the log does prove the extent and quality of the breach.

I hope the Bernie keeps up his lawsuit and that we find out the full truth on this.

I think that Bernie's campaign is doing a lot better than the press or Hillary want to admit. This incident suggest that to me.

Hillary's campaign had access to Bernie's information and could have viewed all or important portions of that information without any log of searches. The fact that there is no log of Hillary searches that look incriminating is not meaningful. The question is whether Hillary's campaign did any overall searches during that time period. Because it would be conceivable that a party could do a general search of the information for a particular factor and save that file then search for its own information and save that file. Later it could compare the two files -- the more comprehensive one including Sanders' information against its own file. The differences would be Sanders information. Of course, what I am assuming in that hypothesis is that Hillary would still be able to maintain Sanders' file information in a general file after NGP Van put the firewall back up. I do not know that to be true. So this hypothesis may be wrong.

[Jarqui]

35. I can't vouch for every single word Uretsky said. Only a good audit can

I said more than once, if I were in his boots and someone had left my data naked for my competitors to see more than once before, as has been alleged, I'd do something similar to what Uretsky did and I stand up to the media and defend him. You cannot roll over and let your vendor or the DNC keep doing that to you.

If he hadn't done what he did, there's a good chance we wouldn't be having this discussion. Because his efforts gathered a lot of proof that the security of that data wasn't great - one security layer vendor controlled.

I generally believe what Uretsky said and feel the logs largely back him up.

I would have gone after O'Malleys data instead, if he's on that system and that data was exposed. And I would have stayed away from Iowa and New Hampshire to help keep the campaign's nose clean. (They'd probably be stuck to work on states that were coming up because that's where unique campaign data would be developed)

[pnwmom]

27. "It's political not substantive." I agree with the political part. That was the point.

This was an example of dirty politics, plain and simple.

So what was Uretsky thinking? He most likely ran the queries to sound out the Clinton campaign’s estimation of its chances in upcoming races. With every query they ran, Sanders staff learned something about what the Clinton campaign thought the distribution of support among voters in early primary states looked like.

[JDPriestly]

30. Maybe he discovered something so fascinating that he threw caution to the wind.

The Hillary campaign may be a lot less confident than it pretends. Judging from the turnouts at speeches in Iowa, I bet that is the case.

That is my suspicion. And Debbie Wasserman Schultz really took advantage of this minor problem.

The anti-Bernie propaganda has done far more harm than Uretsky's glance at Hillary's information.

[passiveporcupine]

19. It really wasn't that big of a deal

The expected documentation under these circumstances would be a screenshot of the score filtering interface showing Clinton scores.

A reference to a list or two created using the scores might be helpful, but once it has been established that one is in fact able to filter, additional lists are not in any way useful to the engineer debugging. If the thinking was that the score access bug had only affected certain states, surely after the third or fourth attempt it would be clear this was not the case.

And this is why Sanders fired Uretsky. He was not just looking for proof of vulnerability...he got carried away and started looking for stats that would help the Sanders campaign in who not to waste time on, or who to waste time on. But these kind of stats are only "somewhat" important, to my mind. Is it possible it helped them pinpoint some voters who could be swayed to vote for Bernie? Of course, but maybe they would have been swayed anyway, just by watching ads on TV.

So what was Uretsky thinking? He most likely ran the queries to sound out the Clinton campaign’s estimation of its chances in upcoming races. With every query they ran, Sanders staff learned something about what the Clinton campaign thought the distribution of support among voters in early primary states looked like.

So really, not much more than looking at polls to see which way the wind is blowing.

Perhaps Uretsky really did begin searching with the intent of assessing the scope of the breach and his curiosity simply got the better of him. In doing this, he touched a very sensitive nerve indeed. But his actions were less comparable to copying sheets from the opposing team’s playbook than opportunistic eavesdropping on its pre-game chatter.

Exactly,,,but that doesn't fit in the DNC or Hillary agenda where thy need to make Sander's a thief so that Hillary is more electable. It was a Benghazi...that's all.

[drokhole]

22. Or rather a BERNghazi!

[Fuddnik]

25. I prefer Wassergate!

[drokhole]

33. Ach ja!

[JDPriestly]

26. Bad metaphor. Benghazi was where Libyan weapons were stored and from where weapons

weapons are alleged to have been transferred to the Syrian rebels with the help of Turkey.

Read the article by Seymour Hersh.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

This rat line could well be the ruination of a Clinton candidacy. The CIA was certainly deeply involved, and apparently the State Department via the Libyan ambassador may have been too.

If Hillary was supportive of the transfer of arms to Syrian rebels, then her campaign is in trouble. This is probably why the Republicans wanted her e-mails so much. We shall see.

But that is a bad metaphor.

Sorry.

[passiveporcupine]

31. Hmmm...not so sure

So you think they attacked this compound because weapons were stored there? Hmmmm....would Ambassador Stevens have approved that? He wasn't into fighting, he was an ambassador of peace, so I kind of doubt it.

from wiki:

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was named the first liaison with the Libyan opposition in March 2011.[31] After the end of the war, both the CIA and the U.S. State Department were tasked with continuing to identify and collect arms that had flooded the country during the war, particularly shoulder-fired missiles taken from the arsenal of the Gaddafi regime,[32][33] as well as securing Libyan chemical weapons stockpiles, and helping to train Libya's new intelligence service.[29]

It could be the CIA had a different agenda than Stevens. But does it even matter?
The fact is I don't think she could have handled the reaction to the attack any better than she did. It was over before anyone could help and Ambassador Stevens knew of the dangers and decided to stay anyway.

So to me the Benghazi still holds. It did not prove that Hillary was incompetent at keeping our ambassadors safe. The republicans were looking for evidence that she deliberately did not defend his position or come to his rescue. If anything, it was the funds congress withheld that might have helped secure the compound and offer more support that left him so vulnerable.

[JDPriestly]

24. Jacobin tries to determine based on the searches what the intent of Bernie's Sanders

campaign was. He interprets their intent as nefarious.

Having used databases but not anywhere near to the extent that Jacobin has, I don't think it is that easy to determine the intent of Uretsky and his staff.

A thorough, unbiased investigation is needed.

As Jacobin admits, the history of the searches was on the database. NGP Van controlled the record of the searches and knows what was searched. They do not know, no one knows what the thoughts were of the people doing the searching.

An independent investigation, perhaps by a court-appointed investigation team is needed to study this.

If I had wanted to obtain information from Hillary's files, I would have searched and saved the results of the entire file then searched for Bernie's files and ratings on the voters. The difference in the two sets of data would be Hillary's information. That would have been less noticeable than the obvious way the Bernie campaign did this. That is something someone who works with databases would easily figure out. So that is why I ascribe a more innocent purpose to the searches and tend to believe Uretsky.

We shall see.

[Jarqui]

28. If I'm in Uretsky's or the Sanders campaign's boots and I'm concerned with

Clinton stealing my data from the October breaches and/or before. There's a pretty interesting way of dealing with it. You put in some fake data that only you know and your lawyer about - including for example, fake email addresses. Put in a few in each state that would have voter data that would appeal to the Clinton campaign (voter has money to donate, likes Hillary, you know ...). If the Clinton campaign starts sending emails to those bogus email addresses that only the Sanders campaign created and knows about, how do the Clinton campaign explain that?

Sanders campaign manager Weaver is "very confident" a campaign got a hold of their data. He wants an audit. If that audit doesn't turn up the trojan horse data, well, he can cry foul on the audit, can't he.

This thing isn't over because the Sanders campaign took Clinton's data last week. The logs and the software vendor have already established that didn't happen. They knew from those logs very quickly it didn't happen. I strongly suspect they did it to smear the Sanders campaign - to make them look bad - worse than they really were at the very least.

This thing isn't over because the Sanders campaign is pretty convinced somebody took their data ... and from the sounds of Weaver, they must have some pretty compelling evidence to keep the court case going and stand in front of the national media maintaining they're "very confident" somebody took their data.

If they're in possession of Trojan horse emails (as one example) or evidence that the Clinton campaign took their data last October or whenever and that comes out, oh, say a week or a few days before Iowa goes to the polls, the primary polls could get pretty interesting, doncha think? Bernie would be getting a little media attention then I'll bet.

You're damn right this isn't over. This thing smells bad. I have no evidence the Clinton campaign is guilty. But the stench to me isn't coming from the Sanders campaign. The way their heading with this, it could be a real problem for another campaign - they're not letting go. If they're truly convinced someone took their data, why should they?

[Kalidurga]

41. There is something odd about the response to this article.

I wonder if anyone who is reading this after 7:52 Central time can guess what it is.

[SusanCalvin]

46. No. Please just tell me. nt

[Kalidurga]

47. The lack of Hillary supporters jumping all over the article

to explain how it is simply just wrong to defend Vangate and Bernie's staff just has to be completely and utterly wrong. And Bernie himself is responsible.

[SusanCalvin]

48. Gotcha. Thanks. nt

[JonLeibowitz]

54. I have the opposite feeling; whenever good points are raised by those qualified to say so, they run.

And they let the story sink to the bottom out of view. They contest issues where they can deflect from the real issues and talk about polls.

This is precisely the type of story they would let drop uncontested so that nobody sees it. Then when you try to post the story to refute their lies on subthreads in other OPs they can deflect and not argue the present OP in full detail.

Watch it happen; I predict it.

[RichVRichV]

44. What truely amazes me here is that any campaign is storing sensitive data under the control

of a third party server, especially when the third party may or may not have bias.


I totally get storing a shared list that all Democrats can access by the DNC. But if I were running a campaign's web server, I would sync a local copy of the list with the DNC's generic list then handle all my sensitive information locally. That would assure that all data is secured and accessible by my campaign only.


Don't give me that campaigns can't write their own filters in time, those are incredibly easy to accomplish, especially if someone makes a general template of the search code to distribute to the various campaigns. I also don't buy the logs being only readable by an NGP-VAN engineers. I know a number of IT professionals and programmers very able at reading even the most obscure logs (myself included).


The rest of the article is an interesting look into the inner workings of the Democratic party's setup. But they really need to decentralize this whole thing. Not only to protect against what happened here, but also to protect against a breach by a Republican operative. If they ever gained access to the VAN server, they would have campaign strategy information for who knows how many Democratic campaigns.

[benjamindavidsteele]

57. Unanswered Questions

http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/34471-the-scandal-of-the-dnc-data-breach

Now, there are several unanswered questions to this episode:

Since the voter data for all the campaigns was exposed during the data breach, did the Clinton campaign access data belonging to the Sanders campaign?

As there was another data breach earlier, did the Clinton campaign access the Sanders campaign data at that time?

Did the data breaches occur only two times, or were there other data breaches, unbeknown to the Sanders campaign?

Has the DNC taken any action against NGP VAN for its lapses in maintaining the security of the data?

Most of these questions will best be answered through an independent audit of the DNC's centralized voter data system. Indeed, the Sanders campaign has demanded such an audit, and it has asked the Clinton campaign to join it "in calling for a thorough, independent investigation starting from Day One." Surprisingly, the Clinton campaign, which was keen to have an investigation of DNC data access by Sanders staff, has not shown any eagerness for the more extensive audit demanded by the Sanders campaign.

On December 24, the DNC chose Manhattan-based private intelligence firm, Kroll, to investigate the breach of its database. While the Clinton campaign was "pleased" with the choice, the Sanders campaign has not given any public reaction. Kroll's elite clientele is believed to include firms against whom Sanders has been stumping this primary season.