Democratic National Committee shuts down Bernie Sanders

NPR wrote:Sanders Campaign: DNC Blocking Voter Data Is Overkill, Breach Of Contract

This post was updated at 7:30 p.m. ET

Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign has filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee to regain access to the committee's voter file. The DNC blocked the campaign from the resource Friday after a Sanders staffer accessed data collected and organized by Hillary Clinton's campaign.

According to a motion filed Friday evening in U.S. District Court, Sanders's campaign alleges that the national party is suspending its access to the records — something critical to the campaign's ability to identify and contact voters — without contractual cause.

But the Clinton campaign fired back shortly after the Sanders campaign filed the lawsuit, calling it an "egregious breach" which "is totally unacceptable and may have been a violation of the law."

Sanders Campaign Response

The legal action comes after the Sanders campaign blasted the DNC at a press conference earlier Friday, calling the decision to block the data an "inappropriate overreaction," threatening the lawsuit they followed through on.

The committee is "now actively attempting to undermine our campaign," campaign manager Jeff Weaver said.

"Clearly, while the information was made available to our campaign because of the incompetence of the vendor, it should not have been looked at, period," Weaver added.

"Rather incredibly," he continued, "the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information — information which is the lifeblood of this campaign."

According to the lawsuit, every day without the data costs the Sanders' campaign approximately $600,000 in donations.

What Data Was Exposed

First an explanation of the data breach: Like its Republican counterpart, the DNC maintains a massive database containing information about voters across the country.

Campaigns of all sizes, from presidential down to the local level, are granted access to this information, and use it to organize both big-picture strategy and day-to-day operations.

All campaigns have access to the same basic set of information that states collect about voters: names, addresses, party identification and voting history.

Campaigns add their own information about those voters — usually, information gathered from door-to-door canvassing and phone calls. They also use the data to conduct big-picture modeling about voters' likely preferences for specific candidates and develop their overall strategy.

That proprietary information is supposed to be secure from other campaigns. But on Wednesday, a software bug in the database allowed campaigns to see each other's private voter info.

Sanders Staffer Viewed Clinton Data

A spokesman for the Bernie Sanders campaign confirmed Friday morning that a staff member accessed another campaign's information.

"After discussion with the DNC it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign," said Sanders communications director Michael Briggs. "That behavior is unacceptable, and that staffer was immediately fired."

The DNC says Sanders's campaign won't be able to access the voter database until the incident is fully explained and there's proof that any improperly accessed data has been disposed of.

For its part, Sanders' campaign is blaming the DNC and the vendor that runs the voter file system, NGP VAN. Here's more from Briggs' statement, which implies this week's data breach wasn't an isolated incident:

"Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC's voter file program continues to make serious errors. On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns. At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.

"Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data."

Sanders' supporters are painting this as another instance of the party establishment working against Sanders and favoring his rival Clinton. The DNC was already under scrutiny for a debate schedule that left many wanting more; there's a debate scheduled for Saturday — one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Clinton Campaign: "Our Data Was Stolen"

Clinton's campaign weighed in on the incident Friday afternoon, with campaign manager Robby Mook telling reporters on a conference call that the breach "totally unacceptable" — and claiming that the breadth of the data accessed was much worse than the Sanders campaign has claimed.

"This was a very egregious breach and our data was stolen," Mook said. "We need to be sure that the Sanders campaign no longer has access to our data."

Mook also blasted the Sanders campaign for "politicizing" the incident and fundraising off of the DNC's decision to revoke access to the database. And he said audit files Clinton's campaign had obtained of the breach showed it wasn't just one staffer who accessed the data, but that their records were accessed 24 times by four different employees and that some of the data had been stored.

"This was not an instance where they happened upon information casually," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said. "They made an active effort to search it and retain it."

Locked Out At A Key Time

There's no question that being locked out of the voter files is a major short-term hurdle for the Sanders campaign. Ethan Roeder, who directed data operations for Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, described the national database as "an online search tool that all of the campaign staff all across the country use to do voter contact."

"All of the organization activity that happens on the ground level is managed through this platform," Roeder said. "When you make a phone call or knock on a door or have a conversation with a voter, the result of that goes straight into the [system]," Roeder said. "Not having access means there's nowhere to store your information. And there's nowhere to pull your information back out of."

The DNC and NGP VAN are both pushing back on the suggestion that this breach was anything but an isolated incident.

"This bug was a brief, isolated issue, and we are not aware of any previous reports of such data being inappropriately available," the company said in a blog post on its website. "We look forward to supporting all our Democratic clients, and in particular apologize to the DNC, Clinton and Sanders campaigns for our bug Wednesday. We will continue to work with and report to the DNC regarding this issue to ensure that this isolated incident does not recur. We have and will do better."

The DNC says it has ordered an audit of the breach, what led to the failure and how widespread it was.

"The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it," said DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda in a statement. "We are working with our campaigns and the vendor to have full clarity on the extent of the breach, ensure that this isolated incident does not happen again, and to enable our campaigns to continue engaging voters on the issues that matter most to them and their families."

US Uncut wrote:How the DNC Just Sabotaged Bernie Sanders’ Campaign in One Devastating Move

As chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz has spent the last 8 months using her position to put a lid on Bernie Sanders’ momentum. And after what was arguably the biggest week of the Sanders campaign, she may have finally succeeded.

Late Thursday night, the DNC took the drastic step of cutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to its comprehensive 50-state voter file that lists voter patterns and preferences, effectively shutting down the campaign’s voter outreach operations just over a month before the critical Iowa caucus and a little over 50 days before the New Hampshire primary.

The punishment came about as the result of a 30-minute glitch in NGP VAN — the vendor that handles the DNC’s voter data — in which internal models for each Democratic presidential campaign were briefly available to other competing campaigns while NGP VAN was applying a patch to the software. Michael Briggs, a communications aide for the Sanders campaign, said this isn’t the first time they’ve reported security bugs in the DNC’s voter file.

“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,” Briggs told Buzzfeed News. “At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”

The DNC has vowed to not grant the Sanders campaign access to the voter file until it has proved that it destroyed all of the Clinton campaign data it inadvertently accessed as a result of the glitch. However, as Reddit user bastion_of_press pointed out, the Sanders campaign cannot prove it destroyed something it doesn’t have, meaning the ban on accessing critical voter information could be indefinite.

“The DNC hires a group to manage their database and firewall between the campaigns. They screw up and some low level Sanders staffer sees and reports it. Nothing is saved or printed out and now the DNC is withholding crucial access to voter data until the Sanders campaign can prove it doesn’t have the data from the Clinton campaign and won’t release access to voter data unless somehow the Sanders campaign can prove a negative – that they have destroyed data they don’t have. Which is impossible.”

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Sanders campaign, which recently announced its latest milestone of 2 million campaign contributions, with over $2 million raised in just 72 hours. Sanders also received major endorsements from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America union and secured 88.9 percent of 270,000 votes cast in Democracy for America’s official endorsement poll.

This is far from the first time Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been accused of stifling Sanders’ voice in the Democratic primary contest. Schultz took considerable heat from Democrats for scheduling just six debates compared to the Republicans’ 12 debates. And those six debates are scheduled at times when the fewest amount of voters are likely to watch. In fact, the next Democratic debate, which is taking place on Saturday night at 8 PM Eastern, is happening at the same time as a primetime NFL football game.

Voters eager to pressure Debbie Wasserman Schultz to reverse her decision can call her office at 202-225-7931, and send emails to info@democrats.org. There’s also a petition circulating demanding Debbie Wasserman Schultz reinstate the Sanders’ campaign’s access to the 50-state voter file, displayed below:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Give the voter file back to Bernie Sanders' campaign

We demand that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz immediately reinstate the Bernie Sanders campaign's access to the DNC's 50-state voter file, which is crucial for voter outreach in the last weeks before the first Democratic caucuses. Shutting down Sanders' tools to reach voters is an infringement on democracy.  http://usuncut.com/politics/dnc-sabotages-bernie/ (bottom of page)

Fred Reames wrote:Debbie, stop sending me your requests for donations. You, Ma'am, are a BAD democrat. Why don't you change over to the conservative gang? You would do well working with the secretary state of Kansas.

Jason Toothy wrote:She works for the DNC, she's already in the conservative gang...

Julie Peterson wrote:I'd like to know if they've been holding out on releasing ths info till right before the last debate. The DNC reeks of corrupted rigging but is definitely eager to punish Bernie any way possible.

Richard Johnson wrote:This is an outrage. I expected maneuvers like this as they get more and more desperate, but this takes the cake.

Down with the DNC! If Bernie isn't the nominee i'll vote for Trump, the establishment must disappear.

If Hillary was expecting my vote, she lost it forever.

Horrible!

Debbie :Lusignan wrote:It was THEIR [DNC] breach. The vendor has been reported before by Sanders for these errors. They failed to address it. It happened again. Now, they are using it as an excuse to cripple their campaign. Screw them

Mary Miskanis wrote:Read the article. [Sanders'] staff were the people who alerted the software managers their software was filled with holes and showing hillarys records open for the whole world to see; as they went on to say, it's happened *multiple* times. The article goes on to blame the democratic national committees utter failure to properly manage their archives. Don't be an uniformed yesbot.

Karen Britton wrote:What's your problem with Mary's post?

"The punishment came about as the result of a 30-minute glitch in NGP VAN — the vendor that handles the DNC’s voter data — in which internal models for each Democratic presidential campaign were briefly available to other competing campaigns while NGP VAN was applying a patch to the software. Michael Briggs, a communications aide for the Sanders campaign, said this isn’t the first time they’ve reported security bugs in the DNC’s voter file.

'On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns. Our campaign months ago alerted the DNC to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns,' Briggs told Buzzfeed News. 'At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.' "