Bernie Sanders Campaign Blocked From DNC Voter Info After Improper Access (washingtonpost.com)

PolygamousRanchKid writes with news that staffers for the Bernie Sanders campaign improperly viewed the voter data gathered by Hillary Clinton's campaign by exploiting a software error. "The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign's access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters. The DNC maintains the master list and rents it to national and state campaigns, which then add their own, proprietary information gathered by field workers and volunteers. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by their rivals." On Wednesday, while the software was being patched, it briefly opened access to all of the restricted voter data. The Sanders campaign fired the staffer responsible for viewing the data, Josh Uretsky. The campaign says their access was simply part of an investigation to determine their own exposure, and blames the vendor (and those who hired it) for improperly securing the data.

Comments

Background

[Chris Johnson]

From what the news stories are saying, this firewall-dropping was happening repeatedly. So:

NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.

A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.

One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.

The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.

I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.

In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)

And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.

Re:Background

[Anonymous Coward]

the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time

The DNC suspended Sander's access to DNC's own data, because the DNC as an organisation has decided upon Clinton come what may and Sander's is at best a token horse and at worst a thorn in their side to achieving this.

There is absolutely no question that this would never have happened the other way around. Hilary Clinton's campaign being denied access to their own data because some staffer added strings to a url? Unthinkable. Clinton is the DNC's annoited. Sander's is an unexpected irritant and to be treated as such.

This is a Rovian "technical glitch" story, spun into a convienient excuse to "ratfuck" the party's process for selecting a canditate in aid of helping people reach the "correct" result. Nothing more. Anyone, in 2015, still falling for the excuses being given here seriously needs to consider their critical thinking facilities.

People wonder why Trump is leading the polls. Why people would be attracted to him. Has it ever occured tthat they are also being repulsed by this now standard "post-Watergate" behaviour that is so ubiquitious amoung the "respectable" candidates? I always wondered how far America's elites could test the trust and patience of the people before something finally gave. Trump's candidacy suggest we are nearing that breaking point. The DNC and Clinton's cynical selection gives no comfort we are moving away from it.

Re:Background

[amicusNYCL]

So, no, Clinton did not access any of the Sanders data, and yes, we do KNOW that. It's not speculation, it's a known fact.

...as dictated by Nathaniel Pearlman, co-owner of NGP-VAN (the company in charge of the data), and Hillary Clinton's chief technology officer for her 2008 campaign. Surely there's no conflict of interest there, right?

This should put a final end to the Sanders campaign

Except it won't, regardless of what shills like you tell everyone what "should" happen. You can bray all you want about how Hillary is going to win the general election, but it doesn't make it so until it actually happens. I support Sanders, but I won't vote for Clinton. If you think that all of Sanders' supporters are going to switch to Hillary if she gets the Democratic nomination then you're wrong. I would rather see Sanders run as an independent in the general election, he already has the name recognition and support that would have precluded a run like that if he hadn't been allowed to debate on TV.

But now we know the depths he'll stoop to in order to try for it anyway.

What we know is that he didn't "stoop" to any "depth". His volunteer in charge of data caught the vendor with the firewall down, allowing the Clinton campaign access to all of the Sanders data. We also know that shills like you will continue to try and make this into a loss for Sanders. We already know how Clinton works, this doesn't change our minds. We know that Sanders is trustworthy, and we know that Clinton is not. The DNC can try to handicap Sanders but he already has our support.

DNC doesn't want Sanders to Win Anyways

[sasparillascott]

The DNC doesn't want Sanders to be their candidate any more than the leadership of the GOP desperately doesn't want Trump to be their candidate - cause they both are afraid it would cost them the election at the Presidential and Senate level (and House seats too). Expect the DNC to do anything it can PR wise to help the expected winner to win. JMHO...

Does not compute

[Sumus Semper Una]

Let's try a somewhat-analogous scenario as a thought exercise:

I find out that on my bank's website, I can easily see my neighbor's bank account by doing some obvious URL manipulation.
I immediately tell the bank that I'm worried about the security of my own account because I know that I could go into anyone else's.
The bank locks me, and only me, from accessing any bank accounts, including my own.

That response makes no sense. The only proper response would be to revoke ALL access to the bank's website until such time as the security hole can be confirmed fixed. Otherwise, the implied message is that you should NEVER tell the bank that they have a potential problem.

I just wonder whether this was actually a story of extreme incompetence or extreme corruption.

Re:Oh, and one more thing

[Chris Johnson]

Yeah, that's me. I am a low level data peon typing in the results of canvassing and phone-banking in Keene, New Hampshire. I'm from Vermont, which is how I know about Bernie, and I'm working directly for Bernie's campaign. It's cool, good people, much like the Obama campaigns except more successful.

I've donated to Bernie too :)

I've personally typed data into the VoteBuilder system that Bernie's not allowed to access now, so I'm taking it personally. _I_ typed that data in. I've also given money directly to Bernie's campaign. Do they propose to take that and award it to Hillary too?

I don't know the guy that accessed the data, but I know most of what's on those servers is the voter info, and lots of it is old and obsolete.

I just talked to my boss in the campaign and they're having some kind of meeting and press conference. We actually feel this is a sign that Bernie's doing better than expected and the DNC is panicking. We think they're probably going to give the data back because it's totally impossible to spin 'shutting off Bernie's whole campaign' over one guy who wasn't even a hacker and who went right to the company and told them what he'd done.

On the other hand, if the DNC are dicks and we can't get access to VoteBuilder, we've already seen enough to know the depth of support for Bernie, so we'll just have to go door-to-door without voter lists or data entry. Pure canvassing and ground game, the most important part.

We can tell them what the Democrats are doing to try and stop us (this is why they're bound to give the data back: trying to shut us down that way makes Hillary look very bad. Her people run the DNC and also that database company itself) and we don't technically need VoteBuilder, it just helps organize stuff. You might say maybe we should be knocking on ALL the doors anyway!

They can shut off the computers, but they can't shut off their own voters. And the Dem voters don't have to be turned off, we just need to get out there and talk to people. Bernie's an honest guy and has many great plans that will help the country, even as screwy as it is. We'll give people a chance to vote for Bernie: both in the primary, and then for President. And the country will start growing again, and rebuilding itself, which will put a lot of people to work.

A Democrat FIRED someone??

[ScooterComputer]

[I have no interest in voting for a socialist as President. Just not my politics. Also there is also NO WAY I'd vote for Hillary Clinton. NO WAY. But...]

After all the political snafus and screw-ups that the Democrats have been involved with in the past 30 years, one thing is clear: NO ONE ever gets fired. Ever.

So, if Bernie Sanders helmed a campaign that FIRED someone--I humbly submit that if you're trying to decide between the two, and don't want more of the same from this f'd up political system--Bernie should DEFINITELY get your vote.