With friends like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Hillary Clinton could be gaining a grass-roots army of enemies. That the Democratic National Committee has been working as a shadow pro-Clinton operation, led by 2008 Clinton campaign co-chairwoman Wasserman Schultz, has been a poorly kept secret. Consider that last night’s Democratic debate, one of only six, was the second held on a Saturday night and competed with holiday parties, football and a new “Star Wars” film for America’s attention. So why would the DNC or Clinton want to tick off Bernie Sanders’ supporters, who appeared — until now — to be willing to back the former secretary of state in the end?

~snip~

But going after Sanders only helped fuel his resurgence. His campaign reportedly raised more than $1 million on Friday alone. It could also cost Clinton the endorsement she covets most — Bay State U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The prospect of Warren backing Sanders is the one thing that could throw a major roadblock in the path of Clinton’s coronation. If the Democratic Party’s own system seems rigged, it is Clinton who stands to get hammered. Wasserman Schultz couldn’t resist the chance to swipe at Sanders’ camp even after their access to voter files had been resolved, and despite the fact that the data breach was caused by a DNC vendor.

Sanders’ campaign “accused the homeowner of violating the terms of an agreement, when they had unauthorized access to the house and took things that didn’t belong to them. It was pretty outrageous,” Wasserman Schultz said on CNN yesterday afternoon, hours after the deal to reinstate Sanders’ voter data access had been reached. Last night’s debate might have been ignored by most Americans, who had better things to do. But adding fuel to Sanders’ campaign just weeks before the first primary elections is playing with fire, and it’s Clinton who risks feeling the Bern.


cont'

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/kimberly_atkins/2015/12/atkins_hill_may_need_bernie_s_help_in_end

1. Scheduling primary debates to garner as few viewers as possible

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has taken lots of heat for scheduling only six Democratic primary debates compared to the Republicans’ 12 debates, and for scheduling them at times traditionally known for low TV ratings. Saturday night’s Democratic debate in Manchester, New Hampshire on ABC coincides with a Saturday night NFL football game on CBS, and is additionally competing with the opening weekend for the highly-anticipated Star Wars sequel. The debate is also just six nights before Christmas, when many Americans are likely traveling for the holidays. The next debate in January will take place on a weekend, at the same time as an NFL playoff game. The next debate that’s on a weekend isn’t until February, around the same time as the early primaries.

cont'


2. Grassroots Clinton field offices co-located at DNC offices

In a recent VICE News report, reporter Pete Voelker described seeing firsthand how the Clinton campaign had rented a campaign office within the local Democratic Party office in Nevada, a crucial early primary state. Indeed, both the Clinton field office and the Carson City Democratic Party list the same address: 502 E. John Street.

“..With its walls papered with Hillary Clinton signs and the seats carefully arranged for the Hillary for America ribbon-cutting, it was hard to tell where the Democratic Party’s office ended and the Clinton office began. There were a few signs referencing Obama and the Affordable Care Act, but as far as I could tell, there weren’t any that mentioned the two other Democrats running for president...”

cont'


3. Dismantling Bernie Sanders’ campaign over one staffer’s mistake

The most obvious example of DNC favoritism toward Hillary Clinton was Friday’s snafu that began with the Bernie Sanders’ campaign defending itself against allegations of cheating and ended with Sanders filing a federal lawsuit against the DNC and accusing the party of “sabotage” against his campaign infrastructure to help Hillary Clinton. Events spiraled out of control just as quickly as they unfolded. Josh Uretsky, national data director for the Sanders campaign, admitted to improperly accessing Clinton’s campaign data during a 40-minute security breach within NGP VAN, the system all Democratic campaigns use to monitor voter patterns and conduct outreach. The DNC responded by shutting off the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter database, effectively crippling its ground strategy. Even after Sanders’ campaign manager fired Uretsky, the DNC initially refused to back down from its decision to take away the Sanders campaign’s infrastructure.

cont'


4. DNC finance chair caught raising money for Clinton

The DNC operates under strict rules of remaining impartial during the primary process until the nominee has been selected. But one top DNC official was just caught raising money for the Clinton campaign. Henry R. Muñoz III, who used to be a top fundraiser for President Obama, became the chief of the Party’s finance operations in 2013. This past Summer, he was caught organizing a fundraiser for Clinton in San Antonio, Texas. This is a direct violation of DNC rules, which state:

“..The Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and even-handedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process...”

cont'


5. The DNC lined up superdelegates for Clinton before first debate

The DNC has helped the Clinton campaign subvert the Democratic process by going around the vote and courting party bosses, also known as superdelegates, to preemptively win the nomination before all 50 states have held their primary election. Superdelegates are part of the nomination process, and they are typically DNC leaders and current and former elected officials ranging from governors to members of US Congress. While the remainder of the delegate count will be decided as each state hosts its primary election, the early superdelegate committal to the Clinton campaign is highly suspect, as the commitments come months before the first primary voters cast their ballots.

“I’m happy to provide it to anybody in the media, which will demonstrate that, of course, what the chairwoman said was absolutely false,” Weaver said. “We have responded with information. If they wanted additional information, they certainly should have let us know.”

Weaver also suggested the DNC was likely to settle the case because they were afraid of what might come out in the discovery process of the legal proceedings.

“We will get access to all the internal communications of the DNC where we can demonstrate what I think most people think is going on, which is that there are some people in there who are clearly trying to help the Clinton campaign,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/19/deal-reached-between-sanders-and-dnc-doesnt-do-away-with-the-disdain/

Glenn Greenwald ✔@ggreenwald

Does anyone at this point doubt that the DNC is a full-on, not-pretending-anymore pro-Clinton arm?

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/677977144530763776 …

5:23 PM - 18 Dec 2015

The Hill ✔@thehill

Sanders aide slams Saturday Dem debate: "I guess Christmas Eve was booked"

http://hill.cm/z2oshvO

5:22 PM - 18 Dec 2015

Jim Webb ✔@JimWebbUSA

Good for Bernie. The DNC is nothing more than an arm for the Clinton campaign.

http://cnn.it/1Pe06yQ

2:08 PM - 18 Dec 2015

National Nurses United Press Release, 12/18/15

NURSES BLAST DNC ATTACK ON SANDERS CAMPAIGN
WARN OF LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES FOR NEXT NOVEMBER



National Nurses United today condemned what it called “the latest blatant effort by the Democratic National Committee to rig the primary process” in its decision to bar the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders access to a critical master list of Democratic voters.

Nurses will join a protest later today outside the Florida district office of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz that is expected to occur at 4:30 p.m. ET at 10100 Pines Blvd., in Pembroke Pines, Fl.

The decision by the DNC, said NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro, “continues an anti-democratic pattern by the DNC to derail the growing grassroots momentum of the Sanders campaign and the millions of Americans who support it.”

“What the DNC should clearly understand is they are playing a very dangerous game. Their cynical effort to stack this process could well turn off millions of voters who they will need to win an election next November,” DeMoro said.

Further, considering the breach that was the pretext for the DNC attack on the Sanders campaign was the mistakes of a vendor, and the Sanders campaign responded by self-reporting the breach and firing a staff member, “the DNC has sent an appalling message encouraging cover up and silence rather than transparency and self reporting.”

“The DNC should immediately reverse this blatantly partisan decision. We need a fair election, not a coronation,” DeMoro said.

Earlier this week, DeMoro authored a commentary in Huffington Post in which she warned of “people and institutions are working feverishly to convince us that real social change is not possible.” www.huffingtonpost.com/...

No matter what, DeMoro added today, “they will not stop the mobilization of Sanders’ supporters and the aspirations of millions for a fundamental break with Wall Street and the corporate interests who have for far too long dominated our political and economic system,” DeMoro continued.

Most immediately, NNU members will be out in the streets of Manchester, N.H. Saturday morning and participating in a rally later Saturday in advance of a Democratic Presidential debate scheduled for Saturday night (details below).

“The DNC decision to hold a debate on the Saturday night before Christmas, at a time when they know far fewer people will be watching is one of multiple indications that the DNC is determined to hold stack the deck for their preferred candidate and will do whatever they can to engineer the electoral process on her behalf,” DeMoro said.

Signs include:

* Limiting the number of debates, and scheduling the two most recent debates on Saturday nights to restrict the viewership – in sharp contrast to the Republican Party, which has held far more debates, and on weeknights to encourage viewership. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote today, “it’s true that the Clinton camp did lobby the DNC early on for a lower-exposure debate schedule.”

* Pressuring Democratic elected officials and other super delegates to line up behind Clinton with early endorsements.

* The decision to block Sanders campaign from use of a master voter file list in an obvious attempt to weaken its ability to reach Democratic voters just a few weeks before voting begins in the early primary and caucus states.

* The timing on today’s DNC announcement, coming just hours after the reporting of two major new endorsements for Sanders, by the Communications Workers of America and Democracy for America, a major group of grassroots activists, as well as reporting that the Sanders campaign had recorded more than 2 million individual contributions.

DeMoro also noted the decision of the DNC, quietly reported earlier this year, to reopen its national convention to corporate sponsors, “part of an overall recognition of its long-term allegiance, like their Republican counterparts, to Wall Street and corporate America, ties that are threatened by the Sanders campaign and his big army of supporters.”

Details on Saturday’s NNU canvassing and rally in Manchester:

Morning Canvas – Nurses convene at 9:15 a.m., door to door campaigning to begin at 10 a.m., from Courtyard Marriott Manchester-Boston Regional Airport Hotel, 700 Huse Road, Manchester, Merrimack and Amoskeag Conference Room.

Evening Rally – 6 p.m., Saint Anselm College, Main Lawn. (The debate follows at 8 p.m. EST at the college).




http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/19/1461777/-National-Nurse-United-Their-target-is-Bernie-Sanders-and-the-growing-army-who-are-fed-up

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. His volunteer in charge of data caught the vendor with the firewall down, allowing the Clinton campaign access to all of the Sanders data.

This whole thing stinks, it stinks because the co-owner of NGP VAN was Clinton's chief technology officer for her 2008 campaign. If there was proof that her campaign has had access to all of the DNC data during the entire campaign it wouldn't surprise me... It doesn't really mean anything for Clinton's former CTO to say that he pinky-swears that their campaign never accessed the other side. It also makes no sense that anyone running a sensitive system would keep that system online while the firewall is offline for maintenance. If the data is important enough to have a firewall there, then before you take the firewall down you need to make sure that the data isn't going to be accessed or compromised in the meantime.

Let's try a somewhat-analogous scenario as a thought exercise:

I find out that on my bank's website, I can easily see my neighbor's bank account by doing some obvious URL manipulation. I immediately tell the bank that I'm worried about the security of my own account because I know that I could go into anyone else's. The bank locks me, and only me, from accessing any bank accounts, including my own.

That response makes no sense. The only proper response would be to revoke ALL access to the bank's website until such time as the security hole can be confirmed fixed. Otherwise, the implied message is that you should NEVER tell the bank that they have a potential problem.

I just wonder whether this was actually a story of extreme incompetence or extreme corruption.


http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/12/18/1536245/bernie-sanders-campaign-blocked-from-dnc-voter-info-after-improper-access#comments

DECEMBER 19, 2015


WASHINGTON – The Democratic National Committee on Friday capitulated and agreed to reinstate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign’s access to a critically-important voter database.

The about face came late on Friday night as a deadline neared for a hearing on a motion for an emergency injunction which the Sanders campaign sought after he sued the party in U.S. District Court in Washington.

The lawsuit sought the “immediate restoration” of the campaign’s access to the voter database. It argued that without the database, the campaign would lose some $600,000 a day in donations.

The campaign’s access to the database should be restored by Saturday morning in time for the campaign staff and volunteers to contact voters over the weekend.

“We are extremely pleased that the DNC has reversed its outrageous decision to take Sen. Sanders’ data. The information we provided tonight is essentially the same information we already sent them by email on Thursday,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager.

“Clearly, they were very concerned about their prospects in court. Now what we need to restore confidence in the DNC’s ability to secure data is an independent audit that encompasses the DNC’s record this entire campaign. Transparency at the DNC is essential. We trust they have nothing to hide,” Weaver added.

The DNC decision to let Sanders use his own database came after the national party was barraged with outraged messages from grassroots supporters of Sanders. There were more than 214,800 people who signed an online petition to the DNC circulated by Sanders’ campaign. MoveOn.org collected another 250,000 petition signatures and Democracy for America collected 100,000.

Earlier on Friday, Democracy for America issued a statement from Executive Director Charles Chamberlain saying, “The Democratic National Committee’s decision to attack the campaign that figured out the problem, rather than go after the vendor that made the mistake, is profoundly damaging to the party’s Democratic process. DNC leaders should immediately reverse this disturbing decision before the committee does even more to bring its neutrality in the race for President into question.”


https://berniesanders.com/press-release/dnc-to-restore-sanders-campaigns-access-to-voter-files/