StormX
Banned
Washington (CNN)The Democratic National Committee is cutting Bernie Sanders off from a crucial voter database after the party organization said the Vermont senator's presidential campaign took advantage of a software error to access confidential voter information collected by Hillary Clinton's team.
The revelation is emerging ahead of the third Democratic presidential debate of the campaign season on Saturday night and poses a major setback for Sanders, who is mounting a liberal challenge to Clinton. The database is a goldmine of information about voters and being blocked from it could complicate Sanders' outreach efforts. The timing is also challenging, just weeks before Clinton and Sanders are slated to compete in the Iowa caucuses.
The Sanders campaign moved quickly to contain the damage, arguing that the vendor who runs the database made errors. The campaign also fired Josh Uretsky, its national data director.
"On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. "We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes made by the DNC's vendor also have made our records vulnerable."
Still, the campaign said it fired a staffer in response to the breach.
"After discussion with the DNC, it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign," Briggs said. "That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was immediately fired."
The database breach was first reported by The Washington Post. Clinton's campaign hasn't commented on the incident.
Uretsky, the fired Sanders staffer, told CNN Friday morning that he was not trying to access Clinton voter data. Instead, he said he was just trying to "understand how badly the Sanders campaign's data was exposed" by the software error. "We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening," Uretsky said. He added that to the best of his knowledge, "nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit."
According to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda, the data systems vendor, NGP-VAN, alerted the DNC about the issue Wednesday. He said "all users on the system across Democratic campaigns were inadvertently able to access some data belonging to other campaigns for a brief window."
The vendor was instructed "to identify any users who accessed data, the actions they took in the system, and to report their findings to Party and affected campaigns."
The DNC is currently working with the campaigns and the vendor to more fully understand the extent of the breach and to "ensure that this isolated incident doesn't happen again."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-dnc-suspension/
No honor among thieves in the DNC
The revelation is emerging ahead of the third Democratic presidential debate of the campaign season on Saturday night and poses a major setback for Sanders, who is mounting a liberal challenge to Clinton. The database is a goldmine of information about voters and being blocked from it could complicate Sanders' outreach efforts. The timing is also challenging, just weeks before Clinton and Sanders are slated to compete in the Iowa caucuses.
The Sanders campaign moved quickly to contain the damage, arguing that the vendor who runs the database made errors. The campaign also fired Josh Uretsky, its national data director.
"On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. "We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes made by the DNC's vendor also have made our records vulnerable."
Still, the campaign said it fired a staffer in response to the breach.
"After discussion with the DNC, it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign," Briggs said. "That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was immediately fired."
The database breach was first reported by The Washington Post. Clinton's campaign hasn't commented on the incident.
Uretsky, the fired Sanders staffer, told CNN Friday morning that he was not trying to access Clinton voter data. Instead, he said he was just trying to "understand how badly the Sanders campaign's data was exposed" by the software error. "We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening," Uretsky said. He added that to the best of his knowledge, "nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit."
According to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda, the data systems vendor, NGP-VAN, alerted the DNC about the issue Wednesday. He said "all users on the system across Democratic campaigns were inadvertently able to access some data belonging to other campaigns for a brief window."
The vendor was instructed "to identify any users who accessed data, the actions they took in the system, and to report their findings to Party and affected campaigns."
The DNC is currently working with the campaigns and the vendor to more fully understand the extent of the breach and to "ensure that this isolated incident doesn't happen again."
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-dnc-suspension/
No honor among thieves in the DNC
Should be interesting.