Yesterday I received a fundraising appeal from the Sanders campaign captioned “DNC tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton.” The email attacked the DNC for temporarily suspending access to voter data and conjured up an evil party apparatus motivated by no other reason than to “undermine… [Sanders’] insurgent campaign.” Judging by Facebook and Internet comments, this spin has enjoyed early success, and I bet the campaign raises a bunch of money off it, too.
Absent from the email was *any* mention of the Sanders’ campaign’s own serious ethical lapse that led to the DNC’s action: the improper access, searching, saving and sharing of Clinton campaign data from 10 early voting states by four Sanders staffers, including the National Data Director, Josh Uretsky, and his Deputy Director, Russell Drapkin. The software glitch that made the data available was NGP VAN’s error, but exploiting it to search Clinton’s data is entirely on the Sanders campaign. Uretsky was fired by the Sanders campaign, a move that undercut the credibility of Uretsky’s attempts in the press to justify his actions as evidence-gathering to report the problem.
The fundraising email and attack on the DNC capped a day of misinformation from the Sanders campaign which included campaign manager Jeff Weaver claiming that no Clinton data was saved by Sanders’ staffers (despite log evidence that it was saved to Sanders campaign folders in VAN) and asserting that the security glitch was just the latest in a series by “incompetent” vendor NGP VAN, an allegation rebutted by NGP VAN on its web blog and corroborated by Uretsky, who admitted (at 5:47 in this clip), that the previous issues were not “actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system.”
Bernie Sanders made his reputation by speaking truth to power and appearing to be above politics as usual. I’m not sure what that brand is worth now, since he is clearly prepared to have his campaign peddle blatant untruths to raise money, motivate his supporters and manipulate the press – at the cost of the bigger game. Sanders is unlikely to win the nomination. If he doesn’t, what is the legacy of his campaign going to be? Is it energized new voters who help elect a Democrat and advocate for and defend progressive policies? Or is it disillusioned angry Bernie cultists who feel they were cheated by the system? This sorry episode by the Sanders campaign reminds me of of when John McCain, running for President, betrayed everything he stood for by defending the Bush enhanced interrogation protocols.
Much ado about nothing Mr. Bean
And everyone else too 🙂
But in all honesty all the dirty politics of this incident is on the DNC’shand. It’s not just that so many staffers are in the tank for Clinton, and they are according to my friend who works there, but that they are demoralized and feel like DWS is a terrible manager who has screwed up this campaign.
While the GOP gets big ratings, we are left competing with sports on the Saturday night before Christmas. It’s allowed Trump and his noxious ideas to dominate the political season, and all Democrats are standing for is being “not
Those guys” instead of being “fighters for working Americans”. It doesn’t help Clinton either, the DNC is just hurting the whole field with its ineptitude and corruption.
The DNC’s vendor made an update that included a 40-minute data exposure on Wednesday morning. The vendor identified the problem and fixed it pretty quickly. They then checked, SOP if you have a breach, to see if any data was accessed inappropriately. They found the four Sanders staffers who had searched and squirreled away Clinton voter data in their own VAN folders. I would feel differently if the Sanders campaign reported the problem to NGP VAN once they detected it, but they didn’t. They got caught with their hands in the cookie jar by NGP VAN and the DNC, who owns the data. DNC had NGP VAN shut off access until they could confirm that all of the Clinton data was removed from the Sanders campaign folders. Again, SOP for breach response. Sanders fired one of the four responsible staffers; they all should be disciplined. Instead attacking the DNC for a mess his campaign staff created, Sanders should have apologized and worked with NGP VAN to ensure the stolen data was all purged from the Sanders campaign folders.
My understanding is that this vendor has had problems maintaining site and data security for at least months. This specific issue was brought to the attention of the DNC two months ago by the Sanders campaign.
The “dirty” of the DNC is how they badly mishandled the POLITICS of this, just as they’ve so badly mishandled so many other matters of politics.
Politics is supposed to be what the DNC is good at. The POLITICAL handling of this technical issue was abysmally incompetent, and that abysmal incompetence is what makes the DNC “dirty”.
Uretsky admits that the October issue was not with NGP VAN.
NGP VAN’s website also indicates that no prior issue has been raised with them by the Sanders campaign.
That ham-handed is not the same thing as ‘dirty’.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by mere incompetence?
There are so many unforced errors in this situation that it is hard to know where to start. This should have been handled quietly by the DNC.
to forget it: Hanlon’s Law:
I learned the concept through experience, but learned the name this year.
I just learned, thanks to you, that it wasn’t Napoleon who first said that. That kind of saddens me.
n/t
I believe it has demonstrated that it has backbone as such, will come out of this situation stronger. I am extremely disappointed with Ms. Wasserman-Shultz (sp?), but I don’t vote for the DNC, I vote for the candidate and right now, I will support whomever the Democrat Party nominates.
1. The contract with the DNC calls for a 10 day period to redress.
2. There are differing versions of what happened, but the vendor states no sensitive data could be exported or copied.
3. The Hillary campaign is calling foul before the situation has been fully investigated. The DNC should have done this first before taking to the airwaves.
4. Please take a visit to Snopes.com to see what is verified and what is not.
5. This activity is not the modus operandi of the Sanders campaign, and you know it. No Super Pacs. Plenty of donations. No denigration of opponents, just sticking to issues.
6. A similar glitch occurred in October, and Bernie’s campaign reported it promptly. No rush to the media on that one. Yes they thought other campaigns could see their data, and may have.
They saved data that scored Clinton voters within VAN. If not caught, the Sanders campaign could have used this data to make their own voter outreach more efficient by focusing on voters that weren’t strong Hillary supporters and were most persuadable.
The October glitch was not with NGP VAN. That was admitted by Uretsky in his MSNBC interview and also affirmed by NGP VAN on their website.
Uretsky could very well be telling the truth about why he did what he did. It was the wrong way to go about it, and firing him seems justified, but pretending that it undercuts his story is idiotic.
Sanders himself didn’t know about it at the time, and when he found out he fired the person responsible. Whether or not it was unethical, it’s clearly not the candidate, so punishing him out of spite doesn’t make sense. The DNC gave an incredibly severe punishment that was not warranted or necessary. And they did it before investigating what actually happened.
Claims keep flying around about “saving” or “downloading”, which are ambiguous. People jump to thinking that this is about whether they copied data out of the voter file to their own computers, but you seem to understand that it’s about saving folders *within the NGP VAN service*.
Yet even though you understand the ambiguity you’re deliberately exploiting it to confuse. Saving folders within NGP VAN is consistent with Uretsky’s explanation that they were exploring the extent of the problem and preserving a record to document it for a complete report – “hey look, not only can you do these searches on the other campaign’s data, you can also save the results, and here’s the proof, look at these folders”. It obviously does not mean that the Sanders campaign ever used the data in their own field campaign, or that they still have it, which is what you’re implying. They say no to both things, and nobody has any evidence otherwise, but people are alluding both of those things and you’re exploiting this abiguity to mislead and support those allusions.
All of this aside, the DNC overshadowed questions about what Uretsky and his staffers did, by doing something much much bigger: disabling the Sanders field campaign for nearly two days, and without even investigation or advance notice. That’s incredibly corrupt and abusive of power, and it’s a much much bigger deal than what those staffers did, which if left on its own (fire him, seal the breach, and move on) would’ve had no material effect on the campaigns except for a temporary disturbance to Sanders’ data operations.
P.S. If you want to actually understand what happened, ignore the post above, and read this *in full*:
http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-campaign-data-breach-controversy/
Note, BTW, how quietly the DNC appears to have reacted to similar data accesses by other campaigns (including Clinton’s) in the past. Compare to their insanely overblown reaction to this one.
To elucidate this issue pretty weak.
And save and share 24 data files for 10 early voting states to substantiate there was a problem. In fact, he didn’t need to collect any proof beyond his ability to get to the data before calling NGP VAN about the problem. VAN has the capability for admin users to shadow another user – NGP VAN would have been able to do this and immediately see what the Sanders staff were observing. Uretsky was the National Data Director and surely would have known this – his story about collecting evidence deserves zero credence.
That’s all he did – collect the proof to prove a point he’d tried to make to the DNC before.
That is not credible and has been debunked. Sanders’ apology to Hillary at the debate last night should make clear that the staffer was not behaving appropriately.
‘Nutty’ and ‘idiotic’. You also missed my main point, which is that I’m disillusioned and pissed off at Bernie for running against the DNC, which will make our lives harder in November whoever wins.
It sure wasn’t clear from your post that that was its point, camouflaged as it was among a forest of claims and implications that are quite “nutty”.
If that really was your point, you’re backwards: the DNC attacked the Sanders campaign. If advocating as forcefully as possible to get their voter file access back as quickly as possible is “running against that DNC”, it’s the DNC that forced that to happen. A campaign can’t just take days off from field campaigning and sit back and wait just to be nice to the DNC. That’s truly nutty!
Whereas your contribution to the discussion just appears to be insults.
The DNC never ‘attacked’ the Sanders campaign. The Sanders campaign explicitly attacked the DNC.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a tool. Of course, she’s in the bag for HRC. She co-chaired HRC’s 2008 campaign. HRC is the establishment candidate. The DNC is the establishment. Not hard to connect the dots. Bear in mind, I support HRC. Here’s Charlie Pierce:
She actively campaigned against the Democratic opponents of the Diaz-Balart (R-Florida) brothers.
Pierce has been watching DWS for years, and I can’t resist finishing with this gem:
I don’t have an opinion about DWS. I met her once, she seemed no better or worse than other congress critters I’ve met once.
Please don’t insult me by suggesting I’m assuming the Sanders campaign talking points. You are better than that. You might see the issue as simple, but I don’t. No do I seem to be alone.
I’m interested in examining the issue from points of view beyond conspiracy to learn what I can. I do not need an excuse to support Clinton, whom I already support.
DWS is incompetent. (The articles and info I cited predate this incident by years). The data platform sucks. One or more of Sanders’ staffers did something potentially illegal. I don’t suspect Bernie Sanders of anything–maybe he could be blamed for failure to oversee his campaign–but having been involved in and observed many campaigns, I’m inclined to think that he had nothing to do with it. Running a campaign is complex, time insensitive, and relies on work from some people who have questionable motives and also can be pretty freakin’ weird.
Sanders was personally snooping. But the lack of apology from his campaign? The fundraising appeals attacking DNC with no mention of what his team did that led to the lockout? He’s responsible for those.
Not gracefully or fulsomely, but he did it. Better late than never.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
adjective ful·some \ˈfu̇l-səm\
Simple Definition of fulsome
: expressing something (such as praise or thanks) in a very enthusiastic or emotional way
Sanders basically just said flatly “I apologize”.
I suspect his underlying affect was anger at the staffers who put him that position, deliberately damped down.
The candidates did
She’s a hard working ambitious woman, a good democrat and she will recover from this extremely silly mistake.
As for the Bern, he will be fine …got an opportunity to attack the DNC, who have been pissy to him.
Besides campaigns have no souls…
No way is anything about this helpful to the Clinton campaign. Or the party.
A shame we are not running a 50-state strategy, btw, since that is the only way to win.
What is written is they take full responsibility for what happened. The Clinton campaign jumped the gun.
the DNC
was stupid. When an opponent shoots himself in the foot, you don’t stomp on his foot in public.
Who was a relative unknown at the start of the campaign.
They take responsibility for the software glitch, but not for the improper access by the Sanders staffers.
with Hillary and Bernie data. The mistake was to explore the depth of this glitch. However, so far, Mr. Uretsky insists he did not take any data, and NPG VAN said it was not possible. The report I posted was from today, just 2 hours ago. It might be worth reading since they have expanded their responsibility. They also said they did not advise the DNC to shut down Bernie’s records.
That blog was updated on 12-18, not today, 12-19.
Have you ever used VoteBuilder? NGP VAN reported accurately but perhaps misleadingly if you don’t know the application that data was not taken from the system, except for one export they discuss in the blog. But the system is a multi campaign system, where voter data is shared, but each campaign has their own voter ID and modeling info that gets added to the voter data and is only supposed to be visible to that campaign. The HC and BS campaigns get the same voters by design; the glitch was that the campaign specific data was briefly not restricted, allowing Uretsky and the others to access HC data when they should only have been able to see the BS data. They ran searches – the logs are out there, I’ve seen snippets circulating in the coverage – and saved the results to the BS campaign folders, meaning that the data would have remained available to them in Votebuilder after NGP VAN fixed the security glitch. This is clear in the blog post you cite if you read it carefully.
…was it possible that a Clinton staffer could have just as easily seen Sanders data, but it happened that nobody on that side actually did?
But every action in VAN is logged and my understanding is that there is no evidence that any of the other campaigns accessed data in this way.
I’ve heard no comment or action from them on this issue.
Comparing the Sanders campaign’s alleged improper breach of campaign data to George W. Bush’s enhanced interrogation policies seems a huge stretch, particularly given how little we really know about the data breach. The writer of this post may be doing the same thing she is accusing the Sanders campaign of doing.
My comparison is between two politicians with a specific reputation. Sanders, for being truthful and not being about politics as usual. Yet his campaign spent two days saying stuff that wasn’t true and fundraising off it. Not in keeping with his brand. Similarly, John McCain was the last good Republican, the supporter of McCain Feingold campaign finance reform, a principled man who had himself experienced and decried torture. And when running for Prez, he threw all that over, and supported the Bush torture protocols. He betrayed his brand.
a moron. His stupidity is on display almost every Sunday. His problem was that Bush beat him in 2000. After that, it got increasingly more difficult to hide how stupid he was. (Stupid as I mean it here should not be confused with Republican). He chose Sarah Palin as a running mate fer Chrissakes! There’s selling out, and there’s stupid. He’s a mental midget who capitalized on his legitimate heroics as a POW. McCain-Finegold came about after his personal issues with campaign finance.
on display as when he went to Kiev and appeared with notorious Ukrainian oligarchs on the Maidan. We have to be thankful that he did not become president. And, i am eating crow because if voted for the stupid shit.
I thought he was a good guy once too.
To the comparison made. In 2008, McCain’s support for Bush’s interrogation protocol was seen as a flip flop that wasn’t in keeping with McCain’s career.
Time did a whole piece on it, among many other new outlets if you care to Google it. Howard Dean in the Time article was quoted as follows:
“It is shameful that George Bush and John McCain lack the courage to ban torture,” Dean said in a statement. “And it is reprehensible that McCain changed his position on torture just to win an election.”
But I agree the Palin decision was especially idiotic and helped hand Obama the election.
I think the nomination of Sarah Palin was an act of desperation by a party that knew that the catastrophic collapse of the financial system in October of an election year was the death knell of their candidate.
John McCain could have chosen Jesus Christ Himself as his Vice Presidential nominee and would still have lost the election.
Sadly, neither the US electorate nor the elected officials of either party cared enough about even basic decency to do anything at all about the war crimes committed by the George W. Bush administration.
Mr. Dean’s criticisms of the George W. Bush and John McCain would have more substance now if, within 90 days after taking office, President Barack Obama had initiated investigations and prosecutions of the war criminals who brought shame to America for generations to come — war crimes that played an enormous role in creating world crisis we now face.
Mr. Dean’s commentary, like that of pretty much the entire Democratic Party, was empty campaign rhetoric unmatched by genuine integrity.
Got many other things I wanted out of his presidency, but not accountability / prosecution of those responsible for the torture program or the worst of the Wall Street financial crimes and abuses.
Far too many Democrats joined the GOP in papering over both the war crimes and the worst of the Wall Street financial crimes and abuses.
The marked lack of enthusiasm from the Democratic majority in the House and Senate had a great deal to do with Mr. Obama’s betrayal of the world-wide community who naively believed him during the campaign.
I’ve used VAN plenty, but never as an admin. Was this a hack? I just don’t get how it is possible to see another campaign’s data when logged in to an account issued by the campaign for which you work/volunteer.
Some bit of the security functionality broke when NGP VAN did an upgrade.
“We look forward to supporting all our Democratic clients, and in particular apologize to the DNC, Clinton and Sanders campaigns for our bug Wednesday.”
They did not make a conclusion that Bernie “stole data”, and included him in their apology. Above this post by NPG VAN the words “could possibly” was used, not definitely. The answer is still to come. They will do what they have to. Both campaigns should hold their horses until it is “definitely” known that there was malice afoot.
The same blog post (which I linked in my original post) includes the following:
“First, a one page-style report containing summary data on a list was saved out of VoteBuilder by one Sanders user. This is what some people have referred to as the “export” from VoteBuilder. As noted below, users were unable to export lists of people.”
“We are confident at this point that no campaigns have access to or have retained any voter file data of any other clients; with one possible exception, one of the presidential campaigns. NGP VAN is providing a thorough report to the DNC on what happened and conducting a review to ensure the integrity of the system.”
‘We immediately began an audit to determine if any users had intentionally or unintentionally gained access to data they normally would not have access to within the limited timeframe when the bug was live. Our team removed access to the affected data, and determined that only one campaign took actions that could possibly have led to it retaining data to which it should not have had access.”
The presidential campaign twice noted as accessing and potentially retaining data it should not have is Sanders’.
The candidates have moved on, so I will too, but let’s not further spread misinformation. There’s a reason Sanders apologized to Hillary at the debate and fired his national data director.
Sanders was wise to put all this behind him, as this article from The Washington Monthly explains:
….here.
My bad.
The proper thing to do was for Debbie Wasserman to allow them futher use of the DNC data base but allow them to keep all the info they have up to that point along with the work product they put in to it.
The fact that campaigns use the DNC data as a foundation to build on means that the DNC cannot deny the campaigns their work product plus the foundation for that work product. The DNC can shut them off from further use.
That is the appropriate remedy.
This is an exampe of the sleaze type shit we will have again with a Hillary as president.
These people hurt regular dems that you and me Paul.
i meant not allow them further use of the data base but access to everything that had up to that point. That’s where the Cliton sleaze came in. Real Roger Goodell like.
…is that both parties (Clinton’s and Sanders’ respective campaigns) realized that the political downsides of (literally and metaphorically) litigating this outweighed potential benefits. Hence an out-of-court settlement, so to speak.
The fact that a potential civil war (think 1968 and thereafter) was avoided within the Democratic nomination cycle is IMHO very good news.
On a matter of substance, the various VAN products – like Votebuilder here in Massachusetts – have an export function, whereby the full records can be exported in a variety of formats like pdf or Excel. Hence campaigns can (and should) have custody of their work product to date, and develop foundations from that base independently of contracted list management software.
Finally, whatever my opinion of Wasserman-Schultz, the original breach came from Sanders’ functionaries, and Sanders’ eventual response at the debate was both honorable and politically constructive.
The breach came from the vendor. We know about the activity of the Sanders campaign operatives — we do not know about the activity of others (the failure exposed the data to all).
The breach was also not the first failure on the part of this vendor, and a similar failure in October was reported by the Sanders campaign — by the same people now being criticized.
The breach never should have happened. When it did happen, it should have and could have been handled quietly and without fanfare. The fact that it blew up the way it did demonstrates, to me, the incompetence of the DNC in carrying out its role.
The reporting of this entire affair is, like the reporting of the earlier Clinton fiasco, so incompetent that NONE of us know the truth. Instructing a backend system to save or cache results on that back end is not the same as exporting to user files. Viewing data on a screen is not the same as creating local files that capture that data. As far as I can tell, reporters STILL don’t know the difference between running an EMAIL SERVER from a computer in the basement of a residence and using a personal email account on a third-party provider like rackspace. In a similar way, reporters apparently are unable to distinguish material stored on the servers of a vendor hired by the DNC from files passed around by campaign staffers.
I hope that the campaigns have put this issue to bed. As far as I can tell, it never was a technology issue — if it was, it could have and should have been handled quietly and calmly like every other backend issue is handled.
I’ve addressed that a few times in this thread. That it was not is stated in the NGP VAN web post I linked above. It’s also confirmed by Uretsky (the fired Sanders data director) in his interview with MSNBC, also linked by me above.
You are correct that the original problem here was the NGP VAN glitch, but the vendor does not have a recent series of these problems as was stated by Weaver.
Everything is logged in this system. The NGP VAN post, which I quoted from at some length, is clear that the only improper access that took place was the Sanders’ staffers’ access.
There was a breach within NGP, which Sanders techies exploited (more from techie immaturity, IMHO, than from malicious intent). However “viewing data from a screen” is still insecure: if a screensave doesn’t get the data, it can be transcribed manually.
I agree with you about the limitations of many reporters in these matters, which is why I sourced an article upthread, written by an Democratic infotech operative. To quote:
On that, I believe we are in agreement.