Uh-oh — a firewall on a shared Democratic database that was supposed to separate data from the Democratic campaigns was down for a time on Wednesday, and everyone rushed to poach Martin O’Malley’s voters — all three of them. Not really. Here’s what happened, via Buzzfeed:
The Democratic National Committee has suspended Bernie Sanders’ access to the party’s 50-state voter file in response to a software glitch that allowed the Sanders campaign to access Hillary Clinton’s internal voter data.
The DNC move effectively freezes Sanders’ field organizing program six weeks from the first caucuses and primaries.
The breach occurred on Wednesday, a DNC official confirmed, through the NGP VAN, the leading technology company that allows campaigns to identify voters, as well as monitor their preferences and leanings, in what’s called the 50-state voter file. For a “brief window” — about 30 minutes, an official said — a bug in the software exposed the campaigns’ internal “voter ID” data.
During that period, the Sanders campaign discovered the breach, accessed the Clinton campaign’s data, then called the vendor to point out the flaw, according to the official. The DNC has since cut off Sanders’s access to the voter file — until his campaign officials can “prove” they’ve deleted the Clinton data.
If I were Clinton, I’d call on the DNC to immediately restore the Sanders campaign’s access. There is no point in picking an intramural fight — and no need to if you’re in the catbird seat, which Clinton’s campaign is.
Sanders supporters are blowing up social media with conspiracy theories. I’ll take them seriously when they present some solid evidence.
That said, it’s clear (to me, anyway) that the DNC under chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has functioned as Clinton’s coronation committee since the beginning, so they are partially responsible for stoking the paranoia. They are therefore obligated to demonstrate even-handedness now to restore faith in the process.
ETA: The Sanders staffer who accessed the data was subsequently fired by the Sanders campaign; he is Josh Uretsky, national data director. So this wasn’t some low-level nobody. However, CNN has more on this angle:
Uretsky…told CNN Friday morning that he was not trying to access Clinton voter data.
He said instead that 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.”
Baud
Reposted from last thread.
I hope Sanders gets database access back quickly, but what we know so far indicates that Clinton was the victim here. If Clinton’s national data guy had done this, I can’t imagine Sanders supporters not having a fit over it.
Geeno
Agree, DWS can’t even tilt the scales without f’ing it up.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
Social media would have been on fire.
Baud
The only solution is to vote for Baud!
WereBear
Isn’t she a supporter of private prisons in Florida? THIS is a prominent national Democrat? Just what is going on here?
pamelabrown53
@Geeno: @Geeno:
What has DWS done (besides the scheduling of “only” 6 debates) to tilt the scales? This is a sincere question.
Botsplainer
Here’s an idea for the Sanders campaign – quit promulgating his memes with photos with his mouth angrily open, as if he’s lecturing. That may appeal to oldster progressives who like their socialists surly and all revolution-y, but to everyone else it is off-putting.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
I don’t see a source for this part. Who told Buzzfeed that the Sanders campaign would have to do the impossible before they could get access?
Brachiator
Sanders supporters can whip up paranoia themselves, without any help from DWS, so I don’t see that she has any special responsibility to address this. But it is in everyone’s interest to get it settled. I’m sure that the GOP will try to use this as some sign of Democratic Party or Clinton incompetence or malfeasance.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator: Hell, they were still talking about Hilz email on Morning Joe this morning(the Ash Carter email thing prompted it).
debbie
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Has anyone checked to see if any GOP Congresspeople have been abusing their email accounts? Or will this just be another apples v. oranges thing?
Paul in KY
@Baud: If you make the primary ballot in KY, you’ve got my vote!
BillinGlendaleCA
I don’t know if there are any laws or regulations regarding Congresscritters. Though, apparently Cruz and Rubio mentioned some things they shouldn’t have in the last debate.
Kay
I’m full of ideas this morning for the Sanders campaign, so this is what they should do :)
Skip DWS – go under her. Put together a call list of each county chair and state chair and have Sanders’ volunteers make two 5 minute calls, one to each. If they even had 100 callers in one day to each state chair that would be a big deal and it’s kind of a switchup- old fashioned and grass rootsy! They don’t even have to know or care who the state chairs are- just get the volunteers the phone number. It’s different than social media, a live phone call. Harder to ignore.
OzarkHillbilly
Occam’s razor says this is much ado about nothing. That said, You’re right Betty, Clinton should stand up and say, “Restore access to Bernie’s campaign.”
Baud
@Paul in KY: Ballot access may be an issue. How hard is it to write in “Baud”?
Betty Cracker
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I don’t know. The Washington Post has a similar statement that it attributes to the DNC by way of the Sanders campaign:
That really does require some clarification from the DNC.
@Brachiator: Do you believe the DNC under DWS has been a disinterested player in all of this? I don’t. That’s why I say the DNC has a special obligation. Also, the fuck-up was due to a lapse on the part of their vendor, which puts even more of the onus on them.
Botsplainer
On Ash Carter and Hillz’ emails, speaking on behalf of just me, it is annoying as fuck to have to log in and out of multiple email accounts, and there’s probably a lot of “fuck it, I’ll just send him/her a quick note” going on.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: Thwere are many examples of GOPers doing the same thing. IOKIYAR.
Baud
@Botsplainer: I believe it’s a very common practice.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: The vendor is going to need some time to go though the audit logs for the time that the firewall was down. It’ll take some time.
Jade
One more reason why I will never vote for Hillary Clinton ever.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Well, I’ve got to find the little paper thingee. Have never written in a vote before. Guess I’ll have to ask for assistance.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’m not sure how it works on fruity phones; but on my android, you set a default “from” account.
Baud
@Jade: Your vote, your choice. But that’s not a view most of us will sympathize with.
FlipYrWhig
@Jade: I can see why the Sanders campaign’s improper access of Clinton data would turn you against… Clinton? This is fucking ridiculous. As much as I like Sanders, SO MANY of his supporters are proving themselves to be a bunch of whiners and conspiratorial loons. (And, I should add, plenty of the Obama supporters circa 2008 were exactly the same way.)
BillinGlendaleCA
@FlipYrWhig: Maybe, Jade just “Wants to Make American Great Again’.
OzarkHillbilly
@Jade: Yes, because somebody else did something that may or may not give some slight momentary advantage to her campaign. Tell you what, to make your spite complete, why don’t you vote for Ted Cruz while your at it? That’ll show us.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Look at you acting like a politician — all tactful! My impulse was to respond with, “Then you’re a moron,” but I decided it wasn’t worth the pixels.
Satby
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, but that’s way too logical when there’s some 3 minute hate to get on.
Paul in KY
@Jade: For sure, just vote for Nader in the general, like those dumbasses down in Florida did back in 2000.
You’ll be in good company…
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: Ah Betty, you do have a way with words?.
NonyNony
@Betty Cracker:
Providing “assurances” that data has been deleted is very different from “proving” that data has been deleted.
You can’t prove that something has been deleted. It’s impossible, and a demand to do that can be rightly decried as someone putting up roadblocks to make you look bad.
Providing an assurance that something has been deleted is easy. You make a promise and then later if it turns out that you were lying you get punished for it.
These are two very different types of demand.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Satby: I was a DBA for a while when I worked for Satan.
Germy
I am voting for Baud. I want Betty Cracker as VP, Cole as Press Secretary, WereBear on the Supreme Court, Mayhew in Health & Human Services, Satby running Social Security… etc.
magurakurin
If I could wager, I would bet heavily that the Sanders Campaign has access restored by tomorrow or Monday at the latest. But it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. Bernie Sanders’ honest guy shtick is done and dusted. I’m sure he didn’t know anything about it, but it doesn’t matter. This whole thing was supposed to be an experiment in doing politics in a different way. In a fair way, an honest way, free of the normal bullshit that generally surrounds any campaign in one way or another. But this staffer has either with intent or by accident pretty much obliterated all that. Sure, the true believers will never change, but to the average voter, Sanders is now just another politician. It’s not the dirtiest dirty trick ever, hell, it isn’t even really anything out of the ordinary. This kind of shit happens in politics in the white heat of the campaign. But this time was supposed to be different….or so we were being told.
Either way, I’m over it. The hardcore Sanders people are absolutely delusional, but in the end they won’t matter a whit. The overwhelming majority of people now know Sanders and they like him well enough and on his issues he seems to be the go to guy, but people feel Clinton has much greater depth and will make the better candidate and president. No conspiracy by the DNC, no media blackout, no “establishment” crushing the will of the people….just another primary with a winner and a loser. The loser looking ever more likely to be Bernie Sanders. So, bygones.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Germy: Cole as Press Secretary would be a hoot.
Germy
@BillinGlendaleCA: I imagine Cole leaping from his podium to tear Major Garrett limb from limb.
Applejinx
I agree. 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.
How’s that? Tried to sum it up in some way. My hope is still that it blows over, because the last thing we need is scorched-earth behavior from the Clinton campaign.
And I’m certain of something else: the news going the other way through the firewall, from the Bernie side to the Clinton side, must have been FUCKING DIRE because to me this feels like a desperation move. Hillary isn’t stupid, she has to know how this will play out, what the optics are. The only reason she could possibly be doing this is because she has to, absolutely has to, in order to politically survive.
One other point:
No. I work with that data (NOT ANYMORE! ;D) and I know what it is.
It’s numbers, addresses, that kind of stuff. It’s often associated with political alignments, but often it’s just garbage, full of wrong numbers or old addresses or people who turn out to be GOP voters. That’s what this data is. We print it out in countless sheets of paper, and walk the streets knocking on doors, and call people on the phone using these numbers and addresses.
You have to understand that it doesn’t matter. If we can’t get lists of addresses of Dem voters to knock on their doors, and the primary’s approaching, we will just have to go out and knock on every door to support our guy. I’m ready. I don’t know anybody, not a single person in the Keene New Hampshire field office, who wouldn’t take this as a slap in the face and do likewise.
This data that’s being held hostage is NOT the voters. It’s an ever-growing-obsolete pile of addresses and phone numbers that are supposed to be more useful. WE have been building that list for the DNC, with our canvassing and punching data into the big list we’ll all end up sharing.
We can still turn out the voters, and in the worst case scenario if the DNC abandons all pretense of fairness and shuts us off for good from our own damn data, we can go door-to-door and burn up the phones with our new sob story about how the DNC establishment will do anything to stop the grassroots, real-people momentum of Bernie Sanders, but they can’t stop the actual voters from voting.
And it will be true.
MomSense
@Germy:
Just as long as I get National Endowment for the Arts. Nothing puts a bee in the bonnet of the fright wing quite like bare titties on canvasses. Well maybe swears in rap and homoerotic sketches. It’s going to be fun.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Germy: Except Cole would trip over the podium and break his other shoulder.
NonyNony
BTW – this:
Indicates that this “national data director” skipped some of his ethics classes. You don’t verify the integrity of your data by breaching someone else’s data. That’s unethical. (Also technically idiotic – the security breach could be in one direction, and if you know enough to know that it works both ways then there’s no need to test any further). At the point where you know that sensitive data is exposed on a system that you are sharing, the ethical thing to do is to immediately call the responsible parties and inform them, not probe further to “see how bad it is”. And also immediately get your own security locked down as much as possible. Sheesh.
magurakurin
@Jade:
Good on ya mate. We’re farkin’ proud a ya. You’re true blue, mate. Mind if we call ya Bruce just tah keep things simple?
raven
@Applejinx: Jesus, get a blog.
Germy
@magurakurin: If HRC becomes president, do you see a place in her administration for Sanders? Serious question.
Germy
And I want Raven to head up Baud’s Secret Service.
magurakurin
@BillinGlendaleCA: He would be all like
“Fuck me, you’re a moron. How can I answer a stupid ass question like that when I’m sober. Didn’t anyone tell this ass clown I quit drinking? Next question…”
It would be so awesome. Make it so, Number 2.
Germy
@MomSense: You’d be perfect in the NEA.
My God, it’s about time Balloon-Juicers took power. It’d be a Golden Age.
OzarkHillbilly
The stupid, it burns.
Paul in KY
@Germy: I would start watching all White House press conferences!
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Oh my fucking God. THE FACT THAT _OUR CAMPAIGN_ DID BAD THINGS PROVES THAT THE ESTABLISHMENT IS TRYING TO CRUSH US. Listen to yourself. You’re ridiculous.
MomSense
@Germy:
Gilded titties! Genius. It’s going to be so much fun.
MuckJagger
Definitely a Bernie fan here — but I’m always skeptical of that phrase “to the best of my knowledge.”
magurakurin
@Applejinx: damn, you are DEEP in the weeds, here. Are you sure your name isn’t Mclaren?
straight up delusional paranoia. But it looks good on you though.
FlipYrWhig
@NonyNony: It’s obvious track-covering bullshit. “Mom, see, the reason I had that cookie was that I was testing to see how easy it would be for someone ELSE to get to that high shelf and open the jar.”
Betty Cracker
@Applejinx: Here’s where you lost me:
That’s not a reasonable assumption from the known facts. Bernie’s data guy might very well have been an innocent browser attempting to assess the extent of access. But if the shoe were on the other foot and a HRC operative had done this and offered that explanation, would you believe it? Hell to the fucking no.
Kay
@Applejinx:
You can get a voter list from a Sec of State with R and D – depending on the state and how they classify voters. Ohio puts a D or R next to the name based on how the person voted in the last primary which narrows the field a bit. Ohio has a pretty good list- we used it for a school levy. It used to be a disc that they labeled with a Sharpie but now it’s a really nice searchable database :)
I know not all states have voters who declare or collect that info.
I think you’re right that if they let it go on it harms the quality of the D voter list because if you’re doing all that canvassing you’re updating the list- adding quality- and whoever wins the primary that will be the big list.
Bartholomew
Reluctantly, it may again be time for this vaunted movement for justice and tolerance calling itself The Left (brilliant labeling!) … to naderize Sanders and his supporters. Rise Bolsheviks!
Baud: “Your vote, your choice. But that’s not a view most of us will sympathize with.”
Paul in KY: “For sure, just vote for Nader in the general, like those dumbasses down in Florida did back in 2000.”
Until today I was going to submit to the groupthink and just vote for the corporate southerner chic who likes war. Thank you for the reminder of who her supporters are. Fight Fight Fight!
How exciting to be a dem! It is like playing team sports without a team! Awesome!
magurakurin
@Germy: Serious answer, and not that I really know, but just thinking about it, probably not, because I’m guessing Sanders wouldn’t want it. I think he is happy in the Senate. I just read an article about how he has been a bit AWOL in Iowa partly because he spends so much time in the Senate. He takes the job very seriously. But by all accounts the two of them seem to be perfectly friendly, so I guess there’s a possibility. But something like the Treasury really seems a bit to technocratic for Sanders’ tastes. He can probably achieve a lot more in the Senate. He’s going to get a lot of votes (not enough to win) and he will have much more status and power in the Senate as a result. I think he will stay there, myself.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: Did this National Data guy ever see War Games? “Do you want to play a game?”
magurakurin
@FlipYrWhig: lol
raven
@Germy: Master of Ceremonies!
Matt McIrvin
@magurakurin: I suspect the vast majority of voters are going to ignore this incident entirely; it’s just too inside baseball. The media might play it up for a little while because it’s an actual story on the Democratic side, which are thin on the ground.
So far I’ve seen conspiracy-mongering from the most vocal fringe of Sanders supporters, and mostly indifference from everyone else.
I find it particularly hard to believe that Clinton’s campaign arranged this because of secret data showing Sanders winning the primary. It’d have to be at variance with every public poll out there. The state of the race hasn’t changed in months: Sanders is still favored to win New Hampshire in a squeaker, but not any of the other early primary states as far as I can tell.
BubbaDave
@NonyNony:
I can see doing something like that with an extremely limited subset of data to gather evidence for a complaint against the database vendor — something like “I, BubbaDave, will do a quick lookup of the BubbaDave record from the Clinton campaign’s perspective to see if the ACLs are borked; since I already know all the info about BubbaDave that’s not really hacking them.” But it was still extremely poor judgement, and he should have known better.
(Better would have been to call in an outside consultancy. “I have just created a low-level Sanders staff login for you. Now go see what you can find, do not share that data with anyone inside the campaign, and prepare a report for the DNC.” Better still to do that jointly with the Clinton campaign and/or the DNC.)
NonyNony
@FlipYrWhig:
I mean maybe – it certainly sounds like ass-covering bullshit – but he could also have a borked sense of ethics when it comes to system breaches. It isn’t like that isn’t a common attitude of a lot of knowitall dudebros on the Internet after all (“hey, it’s YOUR fault for leaving the door open man – I was just pointing out how flawed your security was by violating your security and reading your data to prove my point”). If he’s that kind of guy then he may well have not actually done anything other than access the data to “prove a point”. But that doesn’t mean that his ethics aren’t borked (and he shouldn’t be anywhere near a position of authority over sensitive data).
This is something that should blow over in a day or so, so long as the Sanders campaign makes the right “mea culpa” attitude and the Clinton campaign publicly or privately pressures the DNC to make the embarrassment go away (seriously – this kind of thing hurts Clinton more than Sanders because it gives the nuttiest Sanders supporters an excuse to feel aggrieved. Sanders support is broader than that, but there’s certainly a core of very loud and angry supporters who seem like they could flip to Trump as easily as Sanders because the only reason they’re voting at all is to shove a middle finger into someone’s face.)
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
Unless those students were literate in Arabic, chances are they would have been trying to write out the Shahada from left to right, instead of right to left.
NonyNony
@BubbaDave:
Yes. If you can access your own data through a breach that’s not an ethics violation. That’s the opposite of an ethics violation – it’s your data and you’re testing your own security.
It’s a bit like finding out that there’s a flaw in some Master locks and both you and your neighbor’s doors have Master locks. It’s ethical for you to try to jimmy your own lock. It’s ethical for you to tell your neighbor about the problem. And it’s ethical for your neighbor to ask you to try to jimmy his lock for him to see if it’s one of the broken ones. But it’s not ethical for you to just walk over to your neighbor’s house and jimmy his lock for him without his permission. That last one is analogous to what the Sanders staffer is supposed to have done, and why even if he didn’t intend any malice it’s still a huge ethical problem.
magurakurin
@Matt McIrvin:
You are probably right, but I still think this will soil his brand. His only real hope was to stand above the fray so to speak. Of course that was always bullshit, more or less, anyway. It mostly doesn’t matter because he was never going to win and is never going to win. The hardcores who are going to be aggrieved about this were never going to vote for Clinton or any other Democrat anyway.
In the end, it will be Clinton versus Trump in the steel cage. May God have mercy on our souls if Trump should walk out of that door.
Applejinx
@NonyNony: It’s a firewall, run by a company with Clinton connections to separate their own data from more of their own data. The firewall was repeatedly, observably going down. How could it be only in one direction?
The Sanders campaign DID call the company and inform them. Nothing happened and the firewall went down again, after whatever assurances.
They couldn’t get the security locked down, all their data are on the system controlled by the outside company (with Clinton connections, and in tight with the DNC). We’ve been supplying data TO this system, not trying to get it out. It’s a working tool for GOTV and canvassing.
Talk to some IT staff. You’re not understanding how this works.
magurakurin
@Applejinx:
keep fucking that chicken.
cmorenc
@magurakurin:
All this, exactly.
Bernie has some great ideas, but if he’s at the top of the ticket come November, the GOP will change his name to “Socialist Bernie Sanders”. Too much baggage with “socialist” with too many Americans for what he actually means by that to break through the crud. Whereas, at best the GOP will successfully paint Hillary (and her ex-President husband Bill) as petty scoundrels, who people other than RWNJs nevertheless remember as folks who could make things actually run well, including the economy. American history is full of examples of the electorate being perfectly happy with folks like that running things, their known flaws notwithstanding.
Applejinx
@magurakurin:
I’m a Vermonter and have known Bernie for years.
Nope.
(the ratfuckers are freaking DESPERATE this morning. Who are you people?)
Satby
@Germy: And right there my day was made today, just imagining that. Thank you!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Applejinx: Any firm or their staff that does campaign work for Democrats that’s been in the business over 20 years is going to have a Clinton connection, you remember Bill, right?
magurakurin
We are the evil fucking minions from the deepest circles of Demon Hillary’s fiery pit. We got your fucking number, too, chief. So, watch your fucking back.
NonyNony
@Applejinx:
Ok. So you’re one of those ethically borked dudebros that I was talking about. Breaching someone else’s data to “prove a point” is unethical. If you don’t understand that you really need to think about it a bit.
Also from a purely mercenary, purely tactical point of view your point is stupid. The way this is playing out is exactly the wrong way to get it taken care of. If the Sanders campaign truly thought that there were shenanigans going on with the Clinton campaign there are better ways to deal with them than to create a data breach to “prove your point”. One “off the record” phone call to the New York Times claiming that the data company was dropping the firewall between Sanders and Clinton’s data purposefully to allow Clinton’s team to steal the data would have created a shitstorm on the front page for Clinton to deal with and their hands would have been clean.
OzarkHillbilly
@Amir Khalid: That is what is so ridiculous about the whole thing, The “controversy” is based on complete ignorance which is what the lesson was designed to combat. The fact that it was a religious text is the source of the outrage, even tho nobody could understand it, and no translation was ever provided. And your point about the direction of writing is hilariously correct. I knew that fact but I don’t think I am mentally capable of doing it as my brain is just too wired for left to right. And that would be another educational broadening of the world for students to learn.
I love that teacher and fortunately she is getting lots of support from her students.
FlipYrWhig
@NonyNony: This.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: OFFICER I ONLY SHOPLIFTED TO PROVE HOW MUCH SHOPLIFTING HAPPENS BY NOT-ME THIS IS PURE BIAS
Yutsano
@Germy: I will gladly take commissioner of the IRS. Then demand a budget increase based on sound business principles. The tax money must flow yo.
Satby
@Applejinx: It’s mostly IT staff telling you you’re being a bit ridiculous about this. We know how database security works.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Yutsano:
Jack booted thug.
WereBear
@Germy: My first act as a Supreme Court Justice will be to have a white office cat and not lend my lint roller to Scalia.
Elizabelle
@Germy:
Love that ticket!
Good morning, all. Countdown to Christmas well under way.
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear: Oooohhhh, that’s just cruel. You’re the type that would secretly hide the litterbox in his chambers too, aren’t you?
Punchy
@magurakurin: No way. If HRC wins, theres no reason to not epically troll the assuredly gone-bonkers GOP. Assign Berns as Chairman of Socialist Education, or appoint him the head of the new Cabinet position “Department of Liberal Thought”. Just to fuck with the wingtards. It would be glorious, the heart attacks aflicting Limbaugh and Levin and Boortz…
Applejinx
@NonyNony: The firewall was DOWN. Repeatedly. If anybody was creating a data breach, it was NGP-VAN, and the Sanders campaign wasn’t getting anything back when they talked to NGP-VAN.
They’re just sitting there going, “Okay, firewall is down. It’s us sitting here, and there’s Clinton over there. We’re not going to do anything, so why is this firewall going down? It’s not our system, so we can’t log accesses to the data. Only NGP-VAN can do that as they can see both camps. We can ask them what of our data is now open to the Clinton campaign (and of course the O’Malley campaign but whatever), and they brush us off. How can we find out which stuff of ours is open to be freely read by the Clinton campaign since this firewall, run by a company that holds all the data and that is owned by a Clinton associate since 1992, is again down with no explanation for why it’s down?”
Create a data breach, my ass.
Belafon
@Germy:
Senator. The best place for him.
magurakurin
@Punchy:
That’s a nice one. But maybe it should be a Czar. The Political Correctness Czar.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: MAYBE WE SHOULD CHEAT TO MAKE A POINT ABOUT DATABASE SECURITY AND META LEVELS OF INJUSTICE I AM NOT A CRACKPOT
Satby
@Elizabelle: I’m listening to the repair guy sawing something out of the guts inside my oven. Just hoping for it to be fixed for cookie making this year.
geg6
@Baud:
This. But the Sanders people all seem to me to be that entire subset of the Dem party that are the worst kind of emoprogs. So they are going to whine and cry and stomp their feet either way.
Personally, I have my issues with handing anything to Sanders that is property of the party. He’s not a member and, until he is, I don’t support handing anything that I’ve worked for over many years (and am currently working for) to someone who is pointedly refusing to become a member of it.
Really, it’s my biggest beef with Sanders, who has many positions I wholeheartedly agree with. My other huge beef with him is his blindness to the reality that not all the problems with being a person of color, LGBT, or female are a result of economic inequality or will be solved by economic policy. He’s completely blind to this and it doesn’t speak well for him.
That said, I’ll vote for him or Hillary or Martin O’Malley (should a miracle happen) when the time comes.
Satby
@WereBear: That is deliciously evil!
Marc
If you’re working on the Sanders campaign and you’re frozen in access to your own data you’re going to be pissed.
Seriously- Clinton folks in this thread – this is not helping your cause. It would be a black mark on the Sanders campaign if they stole Clinton data and said nothing. Reporting it immediately is completely different, and pretending that this is some sort of nasty ethical breach disregards even minimal common sense in favor of partisanship.
Seriously – what, precisely, are they gaining by getting access to some data for thirty minutes and then broadcasting that they have it?
Cacti
Sanders operative inappropriately accesses Clinton voter data.
Internet left responds: Damn you DWS!
Betty Cracker
@OzarkHillbilly: Do we know that no translation was ever provided? Because that sounds suspect, given that the lesson identified the Arabic writing as the “Islamic statement of faith.” It would seem pointless in a world geography class to make a reference to that without defining what it is, which is certainly relevant in a world geography context.
I agree 100% that the backlash is absurd. The Islamophobia gripping this country makes me ashamed.
That said, it was also dumb of the lesson planner (the teacher or whoever created the classroom materials) to direct those kids to write “there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah” as a class exercise. It would be a stupid thing to do even given that they wrote it in a language none of them understand and even if it’s true that the kids weren’t told the meaning of what they were writing. It would be a stupid thing to do if the writing were Aramaic and proclaimed the divinity of Jesus.
I’d be mildly annoyed if someone told my kid to do that in a public school classroom, and of course wingnut parents were going to blow a gasket. The teacher / lesson planner didn’t foresee this?
Belafon
@Marc: The Sanders data director fucked up. Dropping this on Clinton is victim blaming.
Geeno
@pamelabrown53: Does it have to be more than that? That created a nice distracting nontroversy. Now this BS? Every time she has intruded on the race, she not only didn’t help, but she’s actually created PR problems for Hilz. With friends like DWS, HRC doesn’t need enemies, and we all know she has plenty of those.
Cacti
Also, too, my spoiler-free review of Star Wars, The Force Awakens:
A more apt title would be The Force Recycled.
FlipYrWhig
@Marc: You know what’s not helping anyone’s cause? The insane level of double-reverse ju-jitsu involved in claiming that a data breach by a high-level staffer for the Sanders campaign does something something that reflects poorly on the Clinton campaign. Just imagine for a nanosecond how Team Bernie would react if a Clinton staffer did anything remotely like this. Total nuclear meltdown.
magurakurin
@Marc:
Then why was he fired so quickly? Obviously someone thought there was something wrong. Probably Sanders himself, because, he basically is an ethical guy. They fucked up, of course they have nothing to gain in what they did, that’s why it’s called “fucking up.”
Whatever, they aren’t ready for prime time and this just reveals that fact a tiny bit more.
Honestly, Iowa can’t come soon enough.
magurakurin
@Cacti:
Damn you to Hell!!
Lee
I more or less give the Sander’s guy the benefit of the doubt.
To use a simple analogy. If he ran “Select * from SanderData” that would not mean anything since he already has access. In order to find you how bad the failure is, you would have to run “Select * from ClintonData,OMalleyData”. He might be able to determine the same thing without accessing any data with ‘Select count(*) From ClintonData”.
Cacti
The speed with which Mr. Uretsky was sacked makes me doubtful of his “who me?” explanation of things.
Satby
@magurakurin: November can’t come soon enough.
magurakurin
@Satby: Indeed, but it’s gonna be a long summer. I won’t breathe easy until I see Florida and Ohio go for Clinton on election night. Trump as president is a place too dark to even imagine about. chilling.
Applejinx
@Marc: Freezing the Sanders campaign out of access to their own data is not helping the Clinton cause.
It’s like the lady opening fire on a shoplifter, if shoplifting was ‘looking at stuff when the firewall is again down with no explanation given’.
I completely understand the way certain Clinton supporters are acting like this is grounds for canceling and disbanding the Sanders campaign (and presumably, awarding the two million individual donations Bernie raised, to Clinton? Is that what you think will happen?) because desperate people will do whatever they need to in order to win. We see that on the Republican side, now we’re seeing it on the Dem side.
But (A) it is not grounds for removing fundamental campaign tools we all run on… people make such a fuss about Bernie not being a lifelong Democrat, and yet you think maybe he should have raised two million donations and amassed a huge ground game and given the DNC none of his information?
And (B) too late. We can canvass without NGP-VAN if we absolutely, totally have to. It will just provoke hostility we don’t really need, and politics is about being able to work with people who suck, sometimes.
geg6
@magurakurin:
Exactly.
geg6
@Jade:
Then you are too stupid to even engage. Blaming this on Clinton is just stupid.
BillinGlendaleCA
@magurakurin: I think Cruz would be a much, much darker place.
magurakurin
@Applejinx: They aren’t going to shut down his campaign or deny him the tools. His campaign will have access again in very short order. Please.
But it does show that his campaign is something of a clown show. I like the guy well enough, but not enough to give him the keys to the general election bus. And the majority of voters agree with me. Sorry if that doesn’t wiggle your waggle, but that’s how it’s gonna go down.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: OBVIOUSLY a story about the Sanders campaign playing around with other campaigns’ data MUST BE something other than a reflection on the ethics and zeal of the Sanders campaign.
Marc
@FlipYrWhig: Calling this a data breach when it’s immediately reported is a ludicrous way of characterizing this.
At worst, it’s someone using ham-fisted tactics to make a point. This has been happening repeatedly, and both sides should be very annoyed at the incompetent vendor – the fact that one side did something and said so right away does not make the Clinton side a “victim”. They’d be a victim if the Sanders team took data and used it without saying anything, at least in the normal way of understanding things.
I also don’t buy the conspiracy angle and think that this shouldn’t be a big deal either way.
NonyNony
@Applejinx: Again nothing you say here indicates that what you should do is go look at Clinton’s data to prove a point. By doing that you have acted unethically.
Think for just 5 seconds – what would you be screaming about right now if it had been a Clinton staffer accused and fired for accessing Sanders data. Even if that staffer was only trying to “prove a point” to the hosting company?
It’s unethical to access data that you know is supposed to be secure, even if the front door is left wide open. Period the end. Stop trying to justify what this dumbass did. Sanders has already acknowledged that what he did was so bad that the guy had to be fired over it. Sanders is taking this far more seriously than many of his vocal supporters are and it reflects well on him, but poorly on a lot of his supporters.
magurakurin
@BillinGlendaleCA: yeah, okay, maybe you are right.
scary monsters, one and all.
debbie
@Kay:
i still think the “old” way is better than any email blast. It was this kind of more direct outreach (headed by JoAnn Davidson) that worked to give Bush Ohio in 2004.
Geeno
@magurakurin: It MUST be a Czar. The right would flip out. In fact, I propose replacing all cabinet level officers with Czars. Then the president can be restyled “the Czar of all the Americas”.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Marc: “It’s OK honey, I just looked at the hot babe and asked for her phone number, it’s not like I slept with her.”
FlipYrWhig
@Marc: I don’t think the story is a big deal. I think it’s revealing that the Berniacs’ reaction to the story is to cry foul about how the explanation must be the RAND Corporation in conjunction with the saucer people under the supervision of the
reverse vampiresClinton campaign, but THE MEDIA WON’T TELL YOU THE TRUTHAmir Khalid
@Geeno:
People living south of Texas and north of Michigan might have a wee problem with that title.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: They stole our name(Randy Newman, Political Science).
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: Yes. Near a vent. Because that’s how I roll.
Marc
@FlipYrWhig: Understood. When given a choice, incompetence is usually a better explanation than evil, especially for software.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker:
Following the links:
So that’s the way it is being reported.
As to,
The way to combat ignorance is with knowledge. Considering the “class covered a variety of religions including Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism.” and the lesson was ” found to be in line with Virginia Standards of Learning for the study of monotheistic world religions”, I’m siding with the teacher.
As to the tempest of stupidity in a teapot, you have one parent who actually said, “She gave up the Lord’s time. She gave it up and gave it to Mohammed.” That tells me the problem isn’t that it was a religious text, but that it was the wrong religion’s text, and the outrage is based on xenophobic fear and loathing.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: Anyone who can read that would immediately ID it as a ‘statement of faith’ (I assume).
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: I grew up in Virginia, I know Virginia, and I could have told you that would blow up in exactly the way it did.
When I was a kid, it was anything that somebody could misinterpret as Satanism that would get the parents riled up. My mom worked in the Prince William County school system and once there was a fuss about the plan to have a magician perform at a school-related function. People in the school administration were worried that they didn’t know where the guy got his “powers”.
Paul in KY
@BillinGlendaleCA: A friend recently was telling me of another mutual friend who is getting divorced, due to cheating. Seems his tech-savvy wife fixed his cell phone so that any text he received or sent was also sent to her phone. Pretty sneaky!
brendancalling
Oh shit.
I KNOW Josh Uretsky. Really well, as it happens. He’s from the old Philadelphia Drinking Liberally crew, and a good guy with a lot of experience on other campaigns (was a delegate for Obama in 2008 from the 2nd Congressional District in PA, for example).
He’s a good guy, dedicated to progressive politics, and not someone I associate with deliberate bad behavior (but obviously knowing nothing about what happened, I’m not going to speculate).
He must be beside himself this morning.
Elizabelle
@Satby: I hope the oven ends up in top shape.
Think how much fun your housemates will have decorating the goodies. Cookie baking is a national good.
Starfish
@NonyNony: When it comes to computer security, things work differently. In the past, people would do what you are saying and treat people as criminals when they found problems. By not distinguishing between the white hat hackers who found a problem and are telling you about it and the black hat hackers who are out to steal all your data, a company puts itself more at risk for having all its data stolen. In that scenario, if anyone finds a problem, the company threatens to sue them if they tell anyone about it.
Now, we are living in the a more sane time when, if someone finds a problem, they tell you, and you look into it and send them a prize for helping you make your software more secure.
When it comes to reporting computer problems, you try to give the person that you are speaking with as much information as possible so they can replicate what you are seeing and also so the Tier 1 tech support dude does not ask you if you have tried turning your computer off and on again and escalates you to someone that can actually solve your problem.
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin: I live in Missouri. I grew up in Missouri. And I can tell you that it would blow up even more epically here. Probably with much display of guns because “FREEDOM!!!!” That is all the more reason to do it because otherwise we are surrendering to the Dark Side* (the forces of ignorance).
*had to throw that in there
Genghis
Applejinx raised some serious points which haven’t been countered. Such as, the firewall has had problems before, the Sanders campaign reported the most recent problem, the provider’s history with the Clinton campaign, the relatively low value of the data, the overreaction by DNC (after inaction over previous firewall problems).
The implication is that the firewall problems in the past could have benefited the Clinton campaign without censure from the DNC.
The DNC and the Clinton campaign need to be above reproach in how this is handled. Replace the vendor, call no harm no foul on either campaign and move on.
Best…H
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig:
Fine. Give us back the data WE have been entering and we’ll call it square.
Right fucking now. I’m going in to enter data into this very system on Saturday. How am I supposed to do that if they can’t print out sheets of addresses and go knock on doors, print out phone numbers and burn up the phonelines?
Alternate proposal: lock down ALL the data, and every campaign can go have a time-out while NGP-VAN fixes their shit. Then all the campaigns can be equally penalized in the weeks before the first primaries.
How convenient that Clinton people want to talk only about some already-fired guy’s breach of security that he immediately went and reported to the company, and not one Clinton person wants to talk about how the DNC has used this as an excuse, by all accounts, to lock the Sanders campaign out of all its OWN data until… whenever. How patriotic, how democratic of you, to whinge about the terrible Bernie hacker and how he deserves to be punished, from the comfort of your cheeto-stained chair.
Meanwhile, I can’t log into VoteBuilder and do my job collecting and entering data for ALL of us, because we’re ‘suspended’. Not from that guy coming to work, no! From the Sanders campaign functioning as a political campaign. Over a guy and three other usernames, walking past a firewall they didn’t take down, and reporting it to the company right away.
Give our data back. Then we can talk.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Whatever condition you have, take the meds and consider upping the dose.
Betty Cracker
@OzarkHillbilly: The stupidity of the Islamophobes is stipulated. My beef is with asking children to write out a statement of any faith. Why go there? Couldn’t the lesson planner / teacher have chosen something neutral to write in order to demonstrate the “complex artistry of the written language used in the Middle East”?
I’m all for the kids learning the major tenants of world faiths, BTW, in a neutral manner, but how does that particular exercise advance understanding? It blew up into a stupid brouhaha, and anyone with a basic grasp of their community’s character should have been able to see that coming a mile away. I don’t think it’s kowtowing to ignorant assholes to avoid inciting that kind of backlash; it’s upholding the strict separation of church and state that protects us all, including my atheist-raised kid in public school.
@Paul in KY: It’s identified as the “Islamic statement of faith” in English on the lesson page (image at link above), though it’s not translated on that page. If the class is covering the major religions in a competent manner, it will be translated at some point, just as students will be told that the divinity of Jesus is a central tenant of mainstream Christianity.
Geeno
@Amir Khalid: I was hoping they’d see the dark humor in it.
Human nature fails me yet again.
Mystical Chick
@Applejinx: Thank you for that reasoned explanation. @magurakin’s comment was so fucking off the wall, it made my head spin.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: What part of ‘because of the decisions of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC, the campaign of the guy I’m working for is unilaterally switched off and I can’t enter data into the only computer system we have, or print stuff out from it for the canvassers and phone bankers to use’ don’t you understand?
I must respectfully suggest that it wouldn’t matter what ‘meds’ I took: I lead the data team for a small Bernie campaign office in New Hampshire, we are counting the DAYS until our primary and scrambling to get our Democratic voters involved, engaged, and to the polls, and we can’t use our computers until this decision is reversed.
It is revealing things about your character maybe you wouldn’t want revealed, to take this angle. Would you say that if Jeb Bush’s people somehow managed to lock Bernie, or Hillary, out of their campaign data?
Jade
@Baud:
I understand that most democrats don’t care that Clinton’s welfare reform increased poverty by 20%, his repeal of the Glass Stegall Act caused the banking crisis, his carpet bombing set up Bush’s IRAQ war, NAFTA has been a disaster for working people.. Hillary has never repudiated any of his policies so Hillary will be Clinton 2.0.
Hillary on her own is a greedy corporatist war monger who is wrong on almost all positions I value. As an independent I don’t vote on party labels. i will vote Bernie in the primary and an independent candidate in the general if Hillary is the nominee.
The DNC coronation of Hillary process greatly underestimates the number of people like me in the political process.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: I am no expert, but if Islamic art is text-based, not figural, and devotional, not secular, and you want to do an “active learning” lesson, isn’t this sort of thing bound to happen?
Belafon
@Genghis: It was a database. The reason we know about the breach is they looked at the database access logs.
This was on the Sanders’ campaign staffer. “You left the cookie jar open!” would get my kids grounded for trying that excuse.
Jade
@geg6:
To clarify, I would never ever have voted for Hillary even before this happened. I think she is a dishonest greedy liar who is wrong on most issues (I understand she is pandering during the campaign). The Clintons have a long record of what they have actually done so pandering is less effective.
This incident is stupid. No one hacked into the system. If i saw new data I would look it, it is human nature. They told right way. More DNC Clinton BS.
Remember how everyone acted like lemmings (lets accept everything Hillary stands for and has done because it is her turn) when the postmortem for her loss is being performed.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: Sounds sorta edgy for that teacher to ID an ‘Islamic Statement of Faith’ as the class assignment. Almost like she was asking for it (the mouthbreather response).
Agree that no religion’s statement of anything should be used, except in a germane history discussion or something like that.
Thank you for the clarification.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Why go there? Let’s just say you and I have a difference of opinion on how best to combat Islamaphobia. I’m not sure how else you do it, especially at this point in time, WITHOUT* getting their panties in a bunch. In fact, I’m not sure that isn’t all the more reason to do it.
* apologies for the all caps, I am unable to highlight text due to mouse difficulties
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Hypothetically, and based on no particular incident, what if there was a candidate named “Barney Saunders” whose volunteers really dislike another campaign and they got caught mucking around in another campaign’s data?
Paul in KY
@Jade: I’m sure President Cruz will right all those wrongs.
FlipYrWhig
@Jade:
People like you greatly OVERestimate the number of people like you in the political process.
Jade
@magurakurin:
Not a democrat. I never voted for Clinton 1.0 either time. I know this board is packed with party line democratic partisans. Remember, you have to recruit independents to win an election. Good luck getting the independent vote with Hillary Clinton.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: It all looks cool, even a advertisement for halal lamb or a hookah bar. I know there is that kind of writing used for non-religious stuff.
Amir, help me out here.
Jade
@Paul in KY:
I don’t see a lot of difference between Cruz and Hillary. Both will lie cheat and steal to win the election. Both of them are warmongers, both of them are greedy unethical people, both of them love corporations and will legislate to make corporations king, both of them are wrong for America if we have any hope of moving the country back in a positive direction.
Jade
@geg6:
I blame the DNC for spinning this nothing event into a big “poor Clinton”. If Bernies campaign wanted to hack Clinton’s data they could have gotten a good hacker to do it without being detected.
The DNC has made it hard the last few years to support any of their chosen candidates. They are as corrupt as the RNC.
Jade
@Paul in KY:
I will vote for the best candidate on the ballot. That will not be Clinton. Sorry, I don’t even see her as the lesser of two evils like I did Obama. I see her as a co-equal evil.
OzarkHillbilly
@Paul in KY: Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism were ALSO discussed in the class.
Applejinx
@Jade: And I in turn am prepared to vote for Hillary provided I think she’s been swung to the left hard enough by Bernie’s run, but will do everything I can to make it Bernie directly.
I think Hillary will do whatever she can to get power, like so many politicians. I think she’s capable of selling out the bankers and competing with Bernie to out-Elizabeth-Warren Elizabeth Warren, if she thinks that’s where the votes are. She’s also capable of being just as Establishment as Jeb Bush, if it pleases her.
When Hillary talks a good populist game, I think that maybe out of self-interest she can do a decent job as a progressive President.
When this shit goes on and she does nothing… and by that I mean, locking the Sanders campaign out of its data so they CAN’T WORK… then I start to believe she’s setting up to be a Democratic Jeb Bush, at best, and is working the system to manage her own coronation and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what we think.
Let her charge to the rescue, demand the release of Bernie’s access to his data, and make a good show of wanting a honest fair fight. It would have great optics and she could take credit for fixing the situation. Whatever. Just as long as we can work!
Bobby Thomson
I love how it’s all Clinton’s fault that Uretsky looked at her lists.
All the childish entitlement in this campaign is coming from the Sanders camp.
Jade
@OzarkHillbilly:
I was not for Hillary before this event. This event is just stupid.
I will vote for an independent candidate if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination. As an independent, if you want me to vote for a democrat run better candidates (Bernie is a better candidate and a better person) however, the DNC is steamrolling the process to make sure Clinton wins. Good luck with that. Her negatives are so high she won’t win much of the independent vote.
Tripod
What’s the old saw? If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Sandersfans need to stop with the tl:dr posts – sorry guys, this was an unforced error.
Betty Cracker
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s inappropriate for public school teachers, government officials, etc., to compel U.S. citizens to write out or recite professions of any faith. Period. Whether they understand what they’re saying or writing or not.
Howlin Wolfe
@Baud: you’ve got mine — you’ve worn me down with your persistent campaign!!
Bobby Thomson
@FlipYrWhig: you misspelled Clinton supporters circa 2008
That said, it’s absurd to blame Clinton or the DNC for what Uretsky did. Sheesh.
Paul in KY
@Jade: You are effing cray cray!!!! Did you escape from Bellvue? They’ll track you down sooner or later…
Amir Khalid
@Paul in KY:
Oh yeah. Arabs put Arabic writing in all kinds of stuff all over the Arabic world. But the kind of people who’d get their panties in a bunch over the Shahada would still get their panties in a bunch over an ad for an Islamic bank or a halal restaurant, methinks.
Betty Cracker
@Jade:
In that case, you really shouldn’t leave home until a helper pins a note with your address on your frock. Otherwise you might wander out onto a hillside and die of exposure.
Genghis
How ironic, given the Congressional hearing over security of the private server used by SOS Clinton. I don’t believe that was malfeasance and neither is the behavior of the Sanders campaign.
Nothing wrong with vendors having previous relationships with political campaigns, provided it isn’t limited to only one candidate. So, what other campaigns has the vendor worked for?
Examining all campaign logs makes sense, since the opportunity to get into each other’s data looks like it has been going on for awhile. Would anyone have known about the breach without the Sanders campaign reporting it within 30 minutes? Exactly what actions were taken by the DNC when previous problems were reported? This will be a tremendously distracting rabbit hole for the media.
Denying the Sanders campaign access to the site is appropriate if all campaigns are also denied access while the multiple firewall failures are examined.
I predict this will be over in less than 24 hours. If it isn’t, it will damage the Clinton candidacy far more than the Sanders campaign.
Best…H
Paul in KY
@Jade: So, hypothetically, if the choices are
A. Hillary Clinton
B. Rick Santorum (just humour me here)
You would say Hillary is NOT the best candidate between those 2?
Paul in KY
@OzarkHillbilly: Was it germane, then, in your opinion?
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: There would be a freakout of some kind, no doubt. However, when the translation said ‘Best Prices on Slightly Used Camels’, instead of an ‘Islamic Statement of Faith’, there might be a teaching moment (for some).
Chyron HR
Is there a single Sanders supporter who isn’t a shrieking psychotic moron? Can we trade in Applejack, Titty, and the brand-new halfwit Jinx for one of them?
Bobby Thomson
@Paul in KY: don’t feed the Republican faux purity troll.
Jade
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I do want to make America great. I want to stop all war activities. All war, drones, and bombs do is increase the number of people who hate us and are willing to plot against us.
I want to cut corporate tax breaks and rebuild the infrastructure and middle class.
I want justice instead of corrupt policing and legal systems.
None of that happens under Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders is the only true for the people candidate.
Hillary is bad for America. The Clintons have a gene that makes it impossible for them to do the right thing. We have found this out over decades.
ruemara
@FlipYrWhig: I believe you mean Clinton ’08 supporters.
@Jade: If it wasn’t clear before, you’re an idiot
Amir Khalid
@Jade:
The reporting tells us that Bernie’s people were accidentally granted access to another campaign’s data; for whatever reason one (or maybe more) of Bernie’s staff took an illicit peek or two. I just don’t see how you get from there to blaming Hillary’s campaign, or the DNC, for setting up a honey trap. I see nothing to support that accusation.
Jade
@Paul in KY:
I would say there is no good candidate there. Clinton is better at saying the right things, but her policies and actual performance would be as bad as Santorum.
I will no longer vote for the lesser of two evils, you still end up with evil.
geg6
@Jade:
You’ve just confirmed for me that you are too stupid to engage.
Have a happy holiday!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chyron HR: My eighteen year old, college freshman nephew told me the other day that there’s no way HRC can overcome Bernie’s lead in the polls. In his defense (besides the whole 18 thing), the media seems to be stuck this year on presenting selected state polls without mentioning they’re just state polls– NH for the Dems, Iowa for the Rs. I don’t remember this being quite so pronounced in the past.
@Bobby Thomson: that stupid looks quite sincere to me.
Kay
@debbie:
I would do it just because it goes to the big complaint about the DNC- how they don’t invest anything in states and are full of management and consultants :)
It’s really populist!
I think it goes with Sanders’ theme, but since no one asked me for advice I’ll stop offering it
Why are they such ham-handed dolts? Suspend ALL the campaign access and investigate. By then all the campaigns will want to get back to work and it will be forgotten. They over-manage.
magurakurin
@Mystical Chick: oh jesus. Cry me a fucking river. lol.
feebog
@Jade:
Y\
You do realize there are primaries every four years, wherein the voters actually get to express a choice of candidates?
And if the choice comes down to Clinton vs. Cruz or Trump, and you would rather vote for the Republican, you are morally bankrupt and a moron.
Jade
@Amir Khalid:
There is as much evidence to support a honey pot as there is to support the fact that Bernie’s campaign did something wrong. NO EVIDENCE AT ALL. That is not stopping the DNC for blaming Sanders and trying to make Clinton the victim.
The DNC forgets that they need the Sanders voters to win. Turn them off or away and she can’t win.
Jade
@feebog:
There are other candidates on the ballot. I usually vote for the Socialist or Green Party candidate. I did vote for the lesser evil the last two cycles. Not sure I got the lesser of two evils.
Jade
@geg6:
You are not stupid. I feel sorry that you can’t engage a different opinion without insults. It doesn’t bother me. I respect your opinion even when I don’t agree with it. I hope everything goes well for you in the future.
geg6
@FlipYrWhig:
Exactly. Love how all these Sanders people seem to think they are the only people who are involved in the campaign and do all the work.
I’ve been working in the street, on the phones and internet and fundraising for Dems every single year since 1976. It isn’t their money, it isn’t their party and it isn’t their data. It’s all of ours, who are Democrats. And Bernie still isn’t one.
geg6
@Jade:
No, you really don’t. You have to get your party comrades out to vote. Independents, based on pretty much every metric, don’t matter all that much.
Amir Khalid
@Jade:
A new breakthrough in genetics!
Somewhat less unseriously, you do know, don’t you, that Hillary wasn’t born a Clinton?
Jade
@Paul in KY:
LOL. I am not new to Balloon Juice and I know that it is a democrat centric blog. I am a strong enough person to express my opinion. It doesn’t hurt anyone to hear another position.
I am concerned that you can’t hear my opinion, disagree, without making it personal. I love you anyway and hope you have a wonderful day.
Applejinx
@Amir Khalid: I don’t see you acknowledging that the DNC have got NGP-VAN to lock Bernie’s campaign out of their own data with mere weeks to go before the primaries.
I don’t actually give a shit about the firewall, why it went down, or who was looking through it those times that Bernie’s people reported the security failure to NGP-VAN and they did nothing, with the Clinton campaign the only other serious campaign sharing those servers and that database.
I don’t care. I think if Clinton’s people were hoovering up Bernie data, it must have scared them very badly if they need to basically call off democracy and switch one of the campaigns off so the ‘right’ candidate wins. That seems outrageous overkill to me, and it’s not playing well to the electorate.
And again, you can talk about the firewall all you want, and blame the Bernie guy who reported what he found immediately, but release the data.
We have work to do as Democrats getting out the vote for our primary, and building up that database into a useful current tool. As far as I know we’re STILL locked out and can’t work.
I’m not going to shut up about that.
“boo hoo, whiny ass titty babies! How unprofessional, just because the other camp seized a pretext and commandeered your computer systems and took them away, rendering you unable to run a campaign.”
What the serious fuck? How is this even legal? Exactly what legal grounds does the DNC have for taking such radical, undemocratic action? This makes the Republicans look civic, and yet it’s happening and we can’t log in. Who gave this order? Who is in charge of selecting the Dem nominee, since it’s obviously not the voters anymore?
Give the data back.
Jade
@Amir Khalid: @Amir Khalid:
The gene appears in a lot of people. That is why we have so many greedy, corrupt, warmongering people in America. Bill found his genetic soulmate.
Jade
@geg6:
OK. I hope your theory works out for you in this election.
Jade
@ruemara:
I am not an idiot. I express my ideas well and I don’t personally attack people with different ideas. Thank you, your opinion matters to me.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The courage with which you type anonymously really puts people like John Lewis in some much deserved shade.
Jade
@FlipYrWhig:
What I have been surprised at as I travel throughout the country is the number of democrats who are supporting Trump. In America celebrity trumps everything else. Be afraid democrats.
Jade
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I am typing my opinion like everyone else. The strong personal responses and visceral attacks are not surprising in 2015.
John Lewis was not known by the masses for a long time after Edmund Pettus.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
One of the places I’ve spent time in that I think had more churches than gas stations, supermarkets and restaurants combined. And all of them seemed to be evangelical types. This was in the south, more rural area, just north of the NC border.
geg6
@Jade:
Get over yourself. You don’t matter to people like me. I’m for the party, not any particular candidate. And the fact that you seem to think I’m a Hillary supporter makes me laugh at your stupidity even more. I support the party candidate. I haven’t decided who I’m voting for in the primary, but that doesn’t even really matter because I’m a later state. So I’ll be working away here to get Dems elected for all the other offices that matter just as much or, possibly, even more and gathering data, canvassing, fund raising and doing everything else people like me do, regardless of whether or not my preferred candidate wins the primary. Because, unlike you, I actually care about women’s issues, minority issues, diplomacy, and all those things you seem to think don’t matter.
magurakurin
@Jade:
Yeah, well this ain’t the Daily fucking Kos. So, your concern don’t mean squat. Nobody gives a shit what you think. Or what I think, for that matter. Hell, nobody really gives a shit what John Cole thinks and it’s his goddamn blog. Now, if you had some cat photos or gumbo recipes…
geg6
@Jade:
I don’t need your respect. I don’t have any for you, so feel free to have none for me.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Good advice.
Subject probably unable to understand.
Tripod
@NonyNony:
They won’t flip to Trump – too down market. These are boutique shoppers.
rikyrah
they have wanted a coronation for Hillary since the beginning. they have never wanted any competition for her. It’s ridiculous.
Goblue72
@magurakurin: If you think Trump has a shot at being President, you’re dumber than a back of rocks.
geg6
I have decided that Jade is a ratfucker. It’s mantra of “I’m an independent…respect my authoritah!” is the giveaway.
Goblue72
@rikyrah: They’ve wanted a coronation since 2008.
Paul in KY
@Bobby Thomson: Sorry. Can’t help myself sometimes. Slow day at work.
Goblue72
@geg6: Oh Jesus. That stupid dead horse? Seriously. Get a clue. Nobody gives a shit that he isn’t a registered Democrat. 90% of the “Democrats” in office are corporate money blowjob queens who’ve been selling the working class down the river the last 40 years.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: Man, it’s Arkansas, Amir. Sorta like KY, I guess ;-)
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: I lived and went to school at the west end of Fairfax County (and mom worked over around Manassas), but it was much whiter, more conservative, and, in the beginning, semi-rural than it is today. There’s a lot of Virginia that is still like that now, though the coalition of minorities and educated NoVa professionals has made it a bluish-purple state overall.
Paul in KY
@Jade: Best wishes. Do not, under any circumstances, buy any ‘magic’ beans.
Germy
@geg6: Lawyers Guns & Money ran a story about a Karl Rove group that is attacking “from the left” hoping to discourage and lower voter turnout.
MaximusNYC
@Botsplainer:
Funny, he’s the leading candidate among millennials.
Goblue72
@FlipYrWhig: I might be with you on that. Except it appears this isn’t first time the flaw happened, and it appears the Sanders campaign complained about it before and were blown off. What were they supposed to do? Keep leaving notes in the suggestion box?
I don’t think Clinton is the second coming of the AntiChrist. But let’s not pretend that they don’t surround themselves with a coterie of arrogant hacks and aren’t themselves corrupt as fuck. If we actually had a deep bench, Hillary wouldn’t be our nominee. Because last time we had at least one good candidate, she lost, even though the other guy had a resume that was paper thin and was basically a state legislator running for President.
Paul in KY
@Goblue72: He has a shot if he’s the nominee.
Goblue72
@Botsplainer: Old people are the ones supporting Clinton. Sanders leads among younger voters. But other than getting all your facts wrong, please proceed.
Goblue72
@Paul in KY: I technically have a shot of winning the lottery if I buy a ticket. But the probability is so low that I’m not planning my retirement around it.
But since this blog spends the bulk of its FP posting “what did crazy thing did Trump do today” posts, I can see how folks get fooled into thinking he’s a serious risk.
Emma
If it wasn’t because of the misery it would bring to millions of working-class people in this country, I could wish President Cruz on us. Just so that the “my personal morality and my prejudices are the only thing that count” would learn their lesson.
Then I realize they’re like those Kentucky people who voted in the candidate who clearly told them he was going to take away their health care. They wouldn’t learn a damn thing.
I think I’ll hold on to my original plan and vote for the Democratic candidate. Whoever it happens to be.
chopper
it isn’t breaking and entering if the security system is off amirite? no officer, i was in their living room proving a point about how easy it is to get through their window!
chopper
@Amir Khalid:
yeah, but once she married bill she underwent a procedure. they do it all using CRISPR these days but back then there was some sort of genetically-modified spider involved. it’s science.
El Caganer
Is this really a big deal? Guy in the Sanders campaign did something he shouldn’t have, campaign cans him and notifies DNC of problem, at the moment DNC has frozen data access for Sanders’ campaign. If they continue the freeze for more than a couple of days, yes, it probably would create a major problem. I don’t see them continuing it when/if the firewall problem is fixed, though – needless bad publicity for everybody and needless internal division in the party. I think this turns out to be a nothingburger
cahuenga
Via Slashdot:
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.
Jade
@magurakurin:
You are awesome. This is the season for Christmas Gumbo.
gwangung
@El Caganer: Only a problem for die hard Sanders supporters who like to lecture minorities on how Sanders is good for minorities
Amir Khalid
@chopper:
I seem to recall, that was basically James O’Keefe’s argument. Didn’t work for him, though. And while I accept that the DNC under Dennie Wasserman-Schulz has shown a pro-Hillary bias, I rather doubt that it laid a honey trap for Sanders’ data people. It seems an indirect way to ratfuck; if it were me I’d try something more direct.
Villago Delenda Est
The rabid Bernie fans remind me too much of Naderites. Right now I’m leaning Bern, but frankly, some of his supporters are fucking idiots.
Frankensteinbeck
When I rephrase this as ‘Bernie Sanders’ National Data Director, Josh Uretsky, admitted to taking advantage of known bugs in the firewall of a Democratic Party database to steal Clinton campaign data’ I lose all sense of outrage at the DNC’s reaction.
Paul in KY
@Goblue72: Back in 1974 or so, if after watching ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’ on Channel 41 at 230 in morn, someone had said ‘You know, he’ll be a 2 term President one day’ & I had said, I think the chimp is already dead, & then they’d said ‘I mean Ronald Reagan’, I’d have laughed my ass off.
In 1976, if after watching Bruce Jenner set a world record in the decathalon & beat the Russian, someone had said ‘You know, he’ll be a woman one day’ & I said, I don’t think the Russians would be allowed to do that & then place her in the heptathalon & they said ‘I mean Bruce Jenner’. I would have laughed my ass off.
Hope you get the picture on crazy things happening.
Brandon
I tried to read this comments thread, but it just wants to make me throw bleach in my eyes. The episode sounds like a tempest in a teacup and frankly, I don’t understand how it is not possible to stipulate that many different things can be true.
Improperly accessing data is very bad.
The DNC also screwed up.
Self reporting by the Sanders campaign is mitigating.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not impartial which unfortunately taints any actions by the DNC.
The punishment appears to be excessively harsh on a campaign more reliant on this resource than the other, particularly since the Sanders campaign does not appear to have materially benefited and has no realistic chance of winning the nomination.
Hardcore supporters of both candidates are insufferable.
Heliopause
It’s not a conspiracy theory to wonder why, from my non-party member’s perspective, what seems like a little intra-party nothingburger has turned into big national news. Somebody decided to make it so. Wolf and his team are having a cow about it as I type.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
I like Sanders, I like his ideas and think that they would help the country immensely. That said we are electing a politician to run 1/3 of the national government and I think that Clinton stands a better chance of doing that. She is better rounded and better experienced. And all that said, she, like every other politician has positions that I don’t like. I have only once voted for the person I thought was an outstanding candidate and that was the current president. And as good as he is I realize that was a once in a lifetime event. We always vote for, in our opinion, the best of the lot or least worse. No republican in my lifetime has been that person, although long ago it was sometimes hard to tell at the time. Not any longer. In reality there are only two people running for president, Clinton and Sanders. And while Sanders ideas are great, how does he propose to implement them? He’s in the right place now to make laws and what has he proposed or gotten passed? How is being president going to make that happen? I’ll answer my own question, it won’t.
Those other people are doing this for vanity or bullshit but they are all fully 100% unprepared for the job.
quakerinabasement
@magurakurin: Also: How’s the soup?
Alex
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-18/sanders-campaign-fires-data-director-after-breach-of-clinton-files
Yeah, that’s a serious screw up by the Sanders campaign.
Cpl. Cam
@Brandon: Thank you! Goddamn, people. Goddamn.
mutaman
“I’ll take them seriously when they present some solid evidence. ”
What are you? Some kind of communist”
Admiral_Komack
@pamelabrown53: Nothing.
Admiral_Komack
@rikyrah: Hey, now!
It’s her turn!
‘Cause she’s a woman…or something…as far as I know…(snark)
Thoughtful Today
…
Clinton supporter Chyron HR: “Is there a single Sanders supporter who isn’t a shrieking psychotic moron?”
Thoughtful Today
…
Clinton supporter magurakurin: “The hardcore Sanders people are absolutely delusional, but in the end they won’t matter a whit.”
Thoughtful Today
…
Clinton supporter FlipYrWhig: “As much as I like Sanders, SO MANY of his supporters are proving themselves to be a bunch of whiners and conspiratorial loons.”
Thoughtful Today
…
Clinton supporters descriptions of Sanders supporters:
Matt McIrvin: “conspiracy-mongering from the most vocal fringe of Sanders supporters,”
NonyNony: “the nuttiest Sanders supporters”
geg6: “… the Sanders people all seem to me to be that entire subset of the Dem party that are the worst kind of emoprogs. So they are going to whine and cry and stomp their feet either way.”
Bobby Thomson: “All the childish entitlement in this campaign is coming from the Sanders camp.”
Paul in KY: “You are effing cray cray!!!! Did you escape from Bellvue? They’ll track you down sooner or later…”
…
All in a single thread.
Thoughtful Today
!!!
And last, but surely not least:
Hillary supporter magurakurin, who I’m sure will pull a Limbaugh and explain that their threat is just a joke and that everyone should lighten up:
“We are the evil fucking minions from the deepest circles of Demon Hillary’s fiery pit. We got your fucking number, too, chief. So, watch your fucking back.”
!!!