Bernie Sanders’ campaign disciplined for data breach

Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders has been suspended from viewing his party’s voter records after it was discovered that one of his staffers viewed confidential information from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz responded that once the committee became aware “that the Sanders campaign had inappropriately and systematically accessed Clinton campaign data”, it directed its vendor to suspend Sanders’ campaign access to the information.

The Sanders campaign said that it had fired a staff member who breached Clinton’s data.

The Sanders campaign said the breach of the files, which contain voter information such as past support and donation history, was an isolated incident and blamed it on the DNC’s software vendor, Washington-based NGP VAN.

The party has ruled it will not restore access to Sanders’ until it can provide a full account of its activities and prove that all improperly accessed filed have been destroyed.

By contrast, Sanders has done just two, in-person fundraisers this quarter, his spokesman Michael Briggs said.

In response, the DNC has cut off the Sanders campaign from accessing key national party voter data, a potentially major setback for the campaign a little more than a month before the Iowa caucuses.

Nonetheless, the DNC has restricted the campaign from being able to access the data at all.

“The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it”, the DNC’s communications director Luis Miranda reportedly said.

“Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data”, Briggs said. They also use the data to conduct big-picture modeling about voters’ likely preferences for specific candidates and develop their overall strategy.

Weaver claimed the Sanders campaign never downloaded or printed any of the data, arguing the campaign is no longer in possession of Clinton’s data and suggesting NGP VAN is at fault for the glitch. “In other words, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is actively trying to undermine our campaign”. He insists that he planned to report the breach to the DNC, but that the DNC had learned of it before he could contact them, presumably from NGP VAN.

“I’m proud to have DFA and its one-million members join our people powered campaign”, Sanders said.

“We shouldn’t get confused in terms of who necessarily raises the most money as opposed to whether or not we’re raising enough money to win”, Sanders said Thursday. The process briefly disabled the firewall surrounding the Clinton campaign’s data.

The DNC is now 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”.