DNC barring Sanders’ team from accessing data after breach

Sanders’ presidential campaign filed a lawsuit against the Democratic Party on Friday after it was temporarily barred from accessing a trove of information about potential voters as punishment for improperly accessing data compiled by the campaign of rival Hillary Clinton. Candidates typically use that data to plan its next move.

The DNC maintains an extensive list of voter information and rents it out to campaigns, which update it with their own data.

Sanders’ attorneys, Benjamin Lambiotte and Sean Griffin, wrote, “Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign”.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was struck with a setback on Wednesday.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, speaking to delegates of the party’s convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sept. 6, 2012. And in September, protesters supporting O’Malley and Sanders, including a top O’Malley aide, protested outside the Democratic Party headquarters, demanding more debates. The outrage has effectively split the party.

The Sanders campaign could not immediately be reached for comment, but campaign manager Jeff Weaver blamed NGP VAN for the glitch and the DNC for hiring a company with repeated issues.

The vendor issued a statement on Friday.

The DNC blocked the campaign from the resource Friday after a Sanders staffer accessed data collected and organized by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “They are attempting to cripple our campaign and we’re not going to stand for it”.

In Clinton’s case, Mook said, the information stored in the database included “fundamental parts of our strategy”. “For that reason this is totally unacceptable and may have been violation of the law”. Firewalls between the campaigns are supposed to prevent breaches. Weaver said the Sanders team had noticed in October that files accessed through the DNC contained proprietary information from all three presidential campaigns. The data includes voting records, volunteering records and information about the likelihood a particular voter will vote for Clinton, Sanders, or another candidate.

The revelation poses a setback for Sanders, who is mounting a liberal challenge to the former secretary of state. Ethan Roeder, who directed data operations for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, described the national database as “an online search tool that all of the campaign staff all across the country use to do voter contact”.

Rather, Uretsky said he had become aware of the breach and just poked around in the Clinton data for a while to see how exposed the Sanders campaign was. But Mook said four staffers were involved. The data, he said, was saved into the Sanders’ campaign account. “Now he’s got his field organizers and data analysts stealing in an act of theft, stealing from the Clinton campaign”.

The DNC’s retribution against Sanders has been swift and painful. “Not having access means there’s nowhere to store your information”.

The campaign filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia late Friday against the party, charging a breach of contract.

The DNC, though, fired back.

Summaries of data logs provided to the AP show the Sanders team spent almost an hour in the database reviewing information on Clinton’s high-priority voters and other data from almost a dozen states, including first-to-vote Iowa, New Hampshire and SC.

Bernie Sanders could find himself on the wrong side of a cybersecurity controversy heading into Saturday’s Democratic debate. “To do that, we need our data which has been stolen by the DNC”.

Sanders is due to face Clinton in a Democratic primary debate on Saturday.

NGP VAN is best understood as a giant portal through which the Clinton and Sanders campaigns can access their data on voter information.

He continued: “We are asking that the Sanders campaign and the DNC work expeditiously to ensure that our data is not in the Sanders campaign’s account and that the Sanders campaign only have access to their own data”.