2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumAn Explanation of What Bernie Sanders Staffers Actually Did and Why It Matters
By David Atkins
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_12/an_explanation_of_what_bernie059035.php
After a spat lasting just over 24 hours, it appears that the top news story of the day is already resolving itself: the DNC has come to an agreement to return voter database access to the Bernie Sanders campaign after top staffers were caught snooping into the Clinton campaigns records.
The brouhaha over this little fiasco has been intense, and made worse by the fact that only a few thousand people in the United States understand anything about the voter tools involved. Few journaliststo say nothing of armchair activistshave enough campaign and field management experience to truly understand what happened. That ignorance has led to wild accusations and silly reporting from all sides, whether from conspiratorially-minded Sanders supporters or schadenfreude-filled Republicans.
The first thing to understand is that NGPVAN is a creaky voter database system that looks, and feels like it was put together in the 1990s. It has been the mainstay of Democratic campaigns all across the country and has intense loyalty among national campaign professionalsthough it should be noted that the California Democratic Party uses one of its more robust and more expensive competitors PDI (PDI, hilariously, sent an email this morning to its users with the subject line At PDI Data Security Is Our Top Priority.) I myself have extensive experience running campaigns on both platforms, both as a campaign consultant and as a county Democratic Party official in California.
The DNC contracts with NGPVAN, meaning that firewalls between competitive primary campaigns within NGPVAN are incredibly important. But they also have been known to fail. When that happens, campaign professionals are expected to behave in a moral and legal manner. But they would also be stupid not to, since every action taken by an NGPVAN user is tracked and recorded on the server side.
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SunSeeker
(51,825 posts)Interesting snippet:
In this context, it made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaigns access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaigns private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited. So it made sense and was fairly obvious that the DNC would quickly end up giving the campaign back its NGPVAN accessparticularly since failing to do so would be a death sentence for the campaign and a gigantic black eye to the party..
joshcryer
(62,287 posts)uponit7771
(90,378 posts)should've been known by the SBS data folk... the logs show it was 40 mins cumulative over a 2 hour period.
That's not just accessing damage