Democratic presidential race explodes after data breach

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was struck with a setback on Wednesday. In a conference call with reporters, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said their rival’s actions were “totally unacceptable”.

The controversy over the data breach comes as Sanders was already struggling to draw attention to his economically-focused campaign message after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, shifted the focus of the 2016 campaign to national security.

“Sanders’ data”, according to a statement released by Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager. At issue is an extensive trove of voter information maintained by the DNC. The campaigns are able to add their own information to that database, information they use to target voters and anticipate what issues might motivate them to cast ballots.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the party committee, said it was indisputable that the Sanders campaign had gained access to information that it knew it was not entitled to.

The suspension is a setback for the Vermont senator – who fired the staffer involved – because the database is a goldmine of information about voters nationwide.

Uretsky said he and his team downloaded only phone numbers but did so to alert the DNC and NGP VAN that the Sanders campaign was aware that voter info in the DNC database wasn’t being properly protected.

The Sanders campaign will remain suspended until it provides the DNC with a full explanation of the episode and provides proof that any accessed data has been discarded.

Sanders’ lawsuit accused the DNC of causing “irreparable injury and financial losses” that top $600,000 per day. If the situation were reversed, she told CNN, the Sanders campaign would expect the same type of discipline of the Clinton campaign.

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”.

The question facing Clinton is how forcefully to confront Sanders about the actions of his campaign staff and whether to defend the reaction of the Democratic National Committee, which cut off Sanders’ access to the party’s voter database after learning of the breach. The back-and-forth underscored Sanders’ attempt to cast himself as an anti-establishment upstart willing to take on Clinton, the unquestioned front-runner for her party’s nomination. Mook responded, “It’s not something to be fundraising off of”. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by rival campaigns.

But the data systems vendor that runs the program dropped the firewall for a brief period Wednesday, during which time the data was accessed.

“This was an egregious breach of data and ethics”, said campaign spokesman Brian Fallon. “When we receive this report from the Sanders campaign, we will make a determination on re-enabling the campaign’s access to the system”, he said. “Last week, the Working Families Party chose our candidate, and today, it looks like the DNC has chosen theirs”, said Working Families Party National Director Dan Cantor, a reference to their endorsement of Sanders. “The data that they reached in and took from our campaign is effectively the strategic road map in those states”.

Uretsky said he was testing the breach, seeing how deep it went and if Sanders’ confidential data were similarly accessible by outside parties.

Sanders supporters were outraged by the DNC’s response to the breach. Audit trails of the logs show that people with the Sanders campaign searched and saved multiple files, creating new lists of their own.