11 ms·

What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?

193 points by idiotclock 11y ago

Amorymeltzer 11y ago
I suppose "filtered" makes a less exciting headline than "hacked voter database" but wow is there ever a gulf between how this has been covered and what happened. Thanks for this.
blfr 11y ago
This is OT but I wanted to ask before: what does the "Jacobin" in Jacobin Mag refer to? Presumably not the more genocidal fraction of the French Revolution which was my first guess?
- jnmandal 11y ago
  It's become more of a broad term in politics that was at first mostly critical (implying much the same of what you're saying here) before being later adopted by the people who see themselves as _very_ left. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics)
- dcre 11y ago
  For more info, here is a great writeup by Alex Payne on why he made a large donation to Jacobin and joined their board: https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html > Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economically, or socially. It is a system designed for the creation and preservation of capital, not human life. I’m a socialist because I believe that the wealth of society can best be harnessed through cooperation, not competition.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front. Sure, blame us for the Holodomor and the "Great Leap Forward" (and other similar artificial famines, disease outbreaks, etc caused by bad state-socialist policy), but don't act like your hands are clean when you support a system that kills, last I remember, 49,000 people each year simply by artificially refusing to treat their diseases, and kills further millions in its endless-yet-pointless foreign wars. I fully support having a genuine contest of ideologies to see who can kill fewer people and save more lives, with greater health and happiness! But that means we have to admit, in the first place, that capitalism kills, which is more honesty than we get out of most people in Western societies today.
    - lliamander 11y ago
      > And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front. Um... that is exactly why we call them murderous. Because they killed people. A lot of them. In cold blood.
      - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        As many as capitalism does?
        jeffbax 11y ago
        You mean, when capitalism isn't bringing unprecedented amounts of people out of abject poverty? (eg, cutting world poverty in half in the past 20 years) Socialism is great, until you read a history book or look at its actual implementation. And no, don't bring up northern EU states that actually depend on quite free market capitalism to finance it (as well as unrealistic monocultures that are unrealistic for the USA, and lead to morally reprehensible immigration restrictions to keep the systems from being overwhelmed)
- tvanantwerp 11y ago
  Having read a few pieces in Jacobin from time to time, your first guess might not be too far off.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  No, it actually means exactly what you think it means: the kind of left-wing revolutionary who fully intends to see some bourgeois heads rolling. As a subscriber, I do think most of us would settle for the abolition of bourgeois class-status rather than bourgeois lives, when it comes to it.
  - randallsquared 11y ago
    How comforting.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      If it was written somewhere that people's stated political ideologies are required to be comforting to others, I could have sued Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan for millions.
      - lliamander 11y ago
        I think what he finds discomforting is that solutions which avoid killing some group of people (in this case, the "bourgeois") is somehow "settling".
        eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        Ah, well that's just bad phrasing. It's not "settling" because we'd prefer to kill more people, it's "settling" because we want to avoid counter-revolutions later.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  They were not genocidal. Just classist.
  - dcre 11y ago
    You might find this interesting, or more likely infuriating: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/socialism-marxism-democracy-inequality-erik-olin-wright/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/socialism-marxism-democra...
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coldcode 11y ago
Interesting read, especially for those of us who have no idea what technology is available for candidates these days. Clearly every one of us exists in these databases (I assume the GOP has such a thing too) and are connected to other data like what we buy or what we belong to. Seeing this data is shared between candidates I wonder how easy it would be for people to manipulate the data for the benefit of one candidate or another. All it takes is poisoning the entries and you could mislead a candidate's plans.
- msellout 11y ago
  Amusingly, there's a similar database sold by the Georgia Secretary of State. Recently they accidentally included the social security number of every registered voter in the database they distributed. If I recall the news article correctly, they mailed it out on CD to 6 different customers before noticing the mistake.
  - tegansnyder 11y ago
    Voter registration databases are available from the Secretary of States office in each state. Anyone can request a file dump; however, some states often charge a small fee for the file. GOP and NDP use different tech stacks, but both are tied to companies (like NGP) that have built processes around obtaining and updating voter registration data yearly from each state. They then tie in historic data they have from door to door canvassing, voter turn out, and any other touch points to build a profile about the voter. Typical data points include voting history, gender, various voter level flags indicating if the voter supports causes/activism, and any other notes or voter related data.
    - phire 11y ago
      Do they have per-voter voting history, or is it a probability based on more coarse-grained voter turnout metrics?
      - Jgrubb 11y ago
mschuster91 11y ago
How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be it personal, commercial or political? (note: I'm from Germany, where politicians aren't totally crazy)
- thomasfoster96 11y ago
  Crazy is relative. But I do find it incredibly worrying how much data campaigns can get their hands on in the USA - I'm pretty sure Australia's rules regarding access to the electoral roll pretty much prohibit it ever being used to target voters in a campaign.
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- Shivetya 11y ago
  Well politicians put an escape clause in the do not call for themselves, I wonder if it applies to associates as well.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  > How on earth is stuff like that legal? There's even weirder stuff: more than half of the states allow people to declare their party affiliation when registering to vote anonymously. Some of them use those declarations to limit access to the primary elections and I'm sure they are very useful in the gerrymandering phase. It's really the lowest possible form of democracy. The next step is the single party system.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
dccoolgai 11y ago
Relevant, from a former DNC Tech Director https://medium.com/@joshhendler/why-the-bernie-breach-isn-t-about-technology-and-what-s-at-stake-c383ee7b840a#.rj1vnicbq https://medium.com/@joshhendler/why-the-bernie-breach-isn-t-...
randomflavor 11y ago
This should be used as an example of why the NSA's capturing of 'metadata' is really a problem. It's basically the same thing and is a big deal. Sucks that Uretsky couldn't help himself to get a sense of what the Clinton camp was thinking tho
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Another point worth making: this is the same type of (meta) data that we use to target drone strikes. Anyone who says metadata is harmless hasn't been paying attention for quite some time.
revelation 11y ago
Accessing data that was made available to you through the reckless indifference of others, but is still meta-theoretically-philosophically forbidden, is a violation of the CFAA. When will the grand jury indict?
RockyMcNuts 11y ago
There's extremely bad blood between the Hillary and Sanders campaigns, and the Sanders guys think the DNC fabricated a scandal by immediately going public, and possibly set them up. https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-taking-their-fight-with-200738611.html https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-takin... There's a big difference between Obama and Hillary, where he's pretty saturnine about attacks on him even when they get pretty crazy, and she takes things more personally and circles the wagons and counterattacks.
- Beltiras 11y ago
  It's been pretty amicable but I think this incident is where they start putting iron into their gloves and spurs on their heels.
- tarr11 11y ago
  Sanders personally took a jab at Clinton during his apology, saying he wasn't sure that her campaign didn't do the same thing, but providing no evidence of that.
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  - SolarNet 11y ago
    How can he when the company in question and the DNC are both for Hillary. How can they know if there is evidence with out the cooperation of those entities. Hence why they are suing to gain access to those records.
    - tarr11 11y ago
      The characterization was that Sanders is "Saturnine" while Clinton is circling the wagons and counterattacking. Clinton said that she was ready to move on from this, while Sanders is looking for an investigation. Since there's nothing else to discover about the Sanders campaign, the public and repeated calls for investigation is presumably to find a smoking gun to prosecute the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the data company for collusion and worse. Seems like a counter-attack to me.
lvspiff 11y ago
A great writeup but reading things over the only thing this shows me is Bernie's people are a lot more dedicated. if Clinton's staffers had the same level/type of access as Bernie's staffers to VAN why wouldn't they be doing the same thing? I find it hard to believe that her staffers wouldn't have noticed the data coming up as well, ran a few queries to realize what was going on, and suddenly realized what was going on and possibly make another couple queries to see what the other was doing. But that would be only if they were actually up and active at the hour the upgrade went into place which from reports sounds like they were not. On a side note - wonder what happened to the VAN QA guy?
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >if Clinton's staffers had the same level/type of access as Bernie's staffers to VAN why wouldn't they be doing the same thing? Because they firmly believe that she is inevitable, or perhaps even entitled to the nomination. Hell, Hillary talks like that herself: >"I would just ask that when this nomination is wrapped up that they come and join with us to make sure that we don't turn the White House back over to the Republicans," she added.[1] Her donors talk the same way: >“Let Bernie outraise her — he’s not going to be the nominee,” a top donor said. “The idea that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz could actually be the president is going to be the greatest fundraising mechanism in the history of the world, and it’s just too early for that.”[2] They don't think this is an election. They think it's a coronation. [1] -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/22/hillary-clinton-tells-bernie-sanders-backers-when-this-nomination-is-wrapped-up-join-me/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12... [2] -- http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-fundraising-hillary-clinton-217063 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-fundrai...
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    I think that Hilary may be known in the future as the one that lost presidency twice. Pundits are greatly underestimating the anti establishment sentiments in the populace. And the Hilary supporters I know right now are smugger than crosfitting vegans. Hubris is the easiest path to a politician downfall and there is quite a lot of it in Hilary's warehouse. Edit: I also don't think that Bill really wants her to be president. His legacy turns from - ruled during the best years of Pax Americana to the husband of the first woman president. I would not be surprised if he pulls his punches.
kevando 11y ago
The DNC is like a company that Sanders doesn't work for.
tdaltonc 11y ago
The frien-nemy relationship that this database represents is super interesting. So each candidate has their own columns in the database. Does that me that, for example, if the governor of California (Dem) endorses a candidate for president, they will share their columns with that candidate? I'm imagining a crypto-key getting plugged into a Mandrill scrips at campaign HQ, and suddenly the emails get 5% more effective.
- e40 11y ago
  Yes, once an endorsement takes place they will share data. It goes further than that, though. Once someone drops out of a race and shares data, donations to the endorsed candidate require a kickback to the original candidate. I don't know the magnitude of the kickback, but the thing I wonder is this: is that money tainted and under the rules of the FEC? Or, can it be spent on anything the once-candidate desires? This just shows how dirty money makes politics.
Lambent_Cactus 11y ago
Really disappointed they went with the bloodless "Datagate" when "VANghazi" was available.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Watergate involved wrongdoing by republican staffers. Bengazi (allegedly) involved wrongdoing by democrats. So there is little debate as to which descriptor a democrat would adopt to attack a fellow democrat. But the use of "gate" does show the age of the candidates. I'd bet most under 30s in the US do not link 'gate' with watergate.
  - wetmore 11y ago
    > I'd bet most under 30s in the US do not link 'gate' with watergate Doubt it. I'm 24. First of all, we obviously learned about Watergate in high school history. Moreover, ever since Watergate happened, people have been overusing the "gate" suffix. Just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate...
sandworm101 11y ago
Lol, one of fields in the VAN database is "Zodiac Sign". Americans are weird.
- feld 11y ago
  A sucker is born every minute, and often identify by their Zodiac
  - MaysonL 11y ago
    Whenever asked my sign, I reply (with Nasruddin) "No Parking".
- wmil 11y ago
  They're probably trying to track teens who are involved politically. They want to know when they turn 18. Asking for a Zodiac Sign is less creepy than asking for a birthday.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    From looking at the image in the OP, they aren't asking 'what's your sign'. It seems a sorting feature. They have the birthdates (not hard to get really) but the software thinks someone might want to sort that list by sign.
  - ConceptJunkie 11y ago
    No, no it's not.
- anonbanker 11y ago
  If you only knew how many politicians find the zodiac to be an essential part of their lives, you would be even more frightened.
ChrisAntaki 11y ago
Interesting article, though it left out some context. The Sanders campaign tried to report this issue months ago [1]. Nathaniel Pearlman, the founder of NGP, now NGP VAN, was CTO of Hillary's 2008 run for president [2]. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Chair of the DNC, was campaign co-chair of Hillary's 2008 run for president [3]. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, has criticized the DNC for being biased against the Sanders campaign several times [4] [5]. [1] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/263730-report-sanders-campaign-told-dnc-of-data-issue-months-ago http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26373... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Pearlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Pearlman [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz [4] https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1119794974699764 https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1119794974699764 [5] https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1120402367972358 https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1120402367972358
- idbehold 11y ago
  It wasn't the same issue and it wasn't even an issue with the same vendor (NGP VAN).
  - ChrisAntaki 11y ago
    Could you send a source? I'm seeing this [1]: > Michael Briggs, a Sanders campaign spokesman, told ABC News that the “vendor who runs the DNC's voter file program continues to make serious errors” and that the “the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns” has failed “on more than one occasion.” [1] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/263730-report-sanders-campaign-told-dnc-of-data-issue-months-ago http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26373...
    - randhacker 11y ago
      The spokesman was incorrect, the October incident was not from NGP VAN. From their press release: "Josh Uretsky, the former National Data Director for the Sanders campaign confirmed on MSNBC (at 5:47), and also on CNN, regarding the previous incident: 'it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system.'" [1][2] [1] http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy [2] http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-campaign-staffer-speaks-out-588356675888?cid=sm_tw_msnbc http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-camp...
yaur 11y ago
The thing I don't understand here... How you can you write a multitenant app where protecting an EAV store is a critical feature and not have tests that validate that your security still works that run before every deploy.
- olefoo 11y ago
  If you live and breathe good software engineering practices; it's sometimes hard to realize that the actual practice in industry varies wildly. From shops where everything flows through the CI server to shops where whoever last pushed to production is the source of all user visible bugs... I have; within the last 6 months, dealt with a team that was reluctant to adopt version control and for whom 'push to production' meant firing up filezilla. They are doing better now but they authored and support several ecommerce apps that handle millions in orders every year. So, yeah; I believe it.
  - MaysonL 11y ago
    A few decades ago I worked at a place where the master source code lived in a tape filing cabinet, accessible to nearly anyone.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  Do you realize the vast majority of apps out in the real world have no tests at all?
skwirl 11y ago
A much different take from another person with extensive experience with the system in question: http://iowastartingline.com/2015/12/19/sanders-campaigns-reckless-reaction-to-data-breach-is-a-danger-to-all-democrats/ http://iowastartingline.com/2015/12/19/sanders-campaigns-rec... The person who wrote the submitted article is a self described socialist. The person who wrote the article I linked to volunteered for the Clinton campaign in 2008. It doesn't matter how much expertise you have in a system when politics is involved. Politics is going to taint your view. There needs to be an independent outside investigation. Personally, I thought the author of the submitted article painted a picture of a serious breach and then tried to downplay it by pointing out that it was not an even more serious.
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betolink 11y ago
Although a little long this video compilation helps to understand key differences between Hillary and Sanders. These differences can be extrapolated to how both campaigns handled the "datagate". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpm4rjejFgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpm4rjejFgQ
platz 11y ago
> The two essential scores are those for support — how likely the voter is to be supportive of the candidate — and “turnout” — how likely the person is to vote (the product of these terms being the likelihood that they turn out and vote for the campaign’s candidate). Is there an assumption then that Support and Turnout are statistically Independent?
anonbanker 11y ago
all of this smells suspiciously of what the RNC did with Ron Paul. What'll really clinch it is if BS gets all the votes, but due to vote tampering (and refusing people at the primaries) Clinton wins.

193 points by idiotclock 11y ago

I suppose "filtered" makes a less exciting headline than "hacked voter database" but wow is there ever a gulf between how this has been covered and what happened. Thanks for this.

blfr 11y ago

This is OT but I wanted to ask before: what does the "Jacobin" in Jacobin Mag refer to? Presumably not the more genocidal fraction of the French Revolution which was my first guess?

jnmandal 11y ago
It's become more of a broad term in politics that was at first mostly critical (implying much the same of what you're saying here) before being later adopted by the people who see themselves as _very_ left. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics)
dcre 11y ago
For more info, here is a great writeup by Alex Payne on why he made a large donation to Jacobin and joined their board: https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html > Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economically, or socially. It is a system designed for the creation and preservation of capital, not human life. I’m a socialist because I believe that the wealth of society can best be harnessed through cooperation, not competition.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front. Sure, blame us for the Holodomor and the "Great Leap Forward" (and other similar artificial famines, disease outbreaks, etc caused by bad state-socialist policy), but don't act like your hands are clean when you support a system that kills, last I remember, 49,000 people each year simply by artificially refusing to treat their diseases, and kills further millions in its endless-yet-pointless foreign wars. I fully support having a genuine contest of ideologies to see who can kill fewer people and save more lives, with greater health and happiness! But that means we have to admit, in the first place, that capitalism kills, which is more honesty than we get out of most people in Western societies today.
  - lliamander 11y ago
    > And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front. Um... that is exactly why we call them murderous. Because they killed people. A lot of them. In cold blood.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      As many as capitalism does?
      - jeffbax 11y ago
        You mean, when capitalism isn't bringing unprecedented amounts of people out of abject poverty? (eg, cutting world poverty in half in the past 20 years) Socialism is great, until you read a history book or look at its actual implementation. And no, don't bring up northern EU states that actually depend on quite free market capitalism to finance it (as well as unrealistic monocultures that are unrealistic for the USA, and lead to morally reprehensible immigration restrictions to keep the systems from being overwhelmed)
tvanantwerp 11y ago
Having read a few pieces in Jacobin from time to time, your first guess might not be too far off.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
No, it actually means exactly what you think it means: the kind of left-wing revolutionary who fully intends to see some bourgeois heads rolling. As a subscriber, I do think most of us would settle for the abolition of bourgeois class-status rather than bourgeois lives, when it comes to it.
- randallsquared 11y ago
  How comforting.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    If it was written somewhere that people's stated political ideologies are required to be comforting to others, I could have sued Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan for millions.
    - lliamander 11y ago
      I think what he finds discomforting is that solutions which avoid killing some group of people (in this case, the "bourgeois") is somehow "settling".
      - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
        Ah, well that's just bad phrasing. It's not "settling" because we'd prefer to kill more people, it's "settling" because we want to avoid counter-revolutions later.
venomsnake 11y ago
They were not genocidal. Just classist.
- dcre 11y ago
  You might find this interesting, or more likely infuriating: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/socialism-marxism-democracy-inequality-erik-olin-wright/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/socialism-marxism-democra...

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coldcode 11y ago

Interesting read, especially for those of us who have no idea what technology is available for candidates these days. Clearly every one of us exists in these databases (I assume the GOP has such a thing too) and are connected to other data like what we buy or what we belong to. Seeing this data is shared between candidates I wonder how easy it would be for people to manipulate the data for the benefit of one candidate or another. All it takes is poisoning the entries and you could mislead a candidate's plans.

msellout 11y ago
Amusingly, there's a similar database sold by the Georgia Secretary of State. Recently they accidentally included the social security number of every registered voter in the database they distributed. If I recall the news article correctly, they mailed it out on CD to 6 different customers before noticing the mistake.
- tegansnyder 11y ago
  Voter registration databases are available from the Secretary of States office in each state. Anyone can request a file dump; however, some states often charge a small fee for the file. GOP and NDP use different tech stacks, but both are tied to companies (like NGP) that have built processes around obtaining and updating voter registration data yearly from each state. They then tie in historic data they have from door to door canvassing, voter turn out, and any other touch points to build a profile about the voter. Typical data points include voting history, gender, various voter level flags indicating if the voter supports causes/activism, and any other notes or voter related data.
  - phire 11y ago
    Do they have per-voter voting history, or is it a probability based on more coarse-grained voter turnout metrics?
    - Jgrubb 11y ago

mschuster91 11y ago

How on earth is stuff like that legal? Being interrupted in my life by robocalls, cold calls, calls from "statistic polls", people arriving unnoticed at my door to waffle about politicians, mail ads... that's intrusive-as-hell advertising. If I were a US voter, I'd do everything but not vote for anyone intruding in my life! And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be it personal, commercial or political? (note: I'm from Germany, where politicians aren't totally crazy)

thomasfoster96 11y ago
Crazy is relative. But I do find it incredibly worrying how much data campaigns can get their hands on in the USA - I'm pretty sure Australia's rules regarding access to the electoral roll pretty much prohibit it ever being used to target voters in a campaign.
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Shivetya 11y ago
Well politicians put an escape clause in the do not call for themselves, I wonder if it applies to associates as well.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> How on earth is stuff like that legal? There's even weirder stuff: more than half of the states allow people to declare their party affiliation when registering to vote anonymously. Some of them use those declarations to limit access to the primary elections and I'm sure they are very useful in the gerrymandering phase. It's really the lowest possible form of democracy. The next step is the single party system.
- mschuster91 11y ago

dccoolgai 11y ago

Relevant, from a former DNC Tech Director https://medium.com/@joshhendler/why-the-bernie-breach-isn-t-about-technology-and-what-s-at-stake-c383ee7b840a#.rj1vnicbq https://medium.com/@joshhendler/why-the-bernie-breach-isn-t-...

randomflavor 11y ago

This should be used as an example of why the NSA's capturing of 'metadata' is really a problem. It's basically the same thing and is a big deal. Sucks that Uretsky couldn't help himself to get a sense of what the Clinton camp was thinking tho

CamperBob2 11y ago
Another point worth making: this is the same type of (meta) data that we use to target drone strikes. Anyone who says metadata is harmless hasn't been paying attention for quite some time.

revelation 11y ago

Accessing data that was made available to you through the reckless indifference of others, but is still meta-theoretically-philosophically forbidden, is a violation of the CFAA. When will the grand jury indict?

RockyMcNuts 11y ago

There's extremely bad blood between the Hillary and Sanders campaigns, and the Sanders guys think the DNC fabricated a scandal by immediately going public, and possibly set them up. https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-taking-their-fight-with-200738611.html https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-takin... There's a big difference between Obama and Hillary, where he's pretty saturnine about attacks on him even when they get pretty crazy, and she takes things more personally and circles the wagons and counterattacks.

Beltiras 11y ago
It's been pretty amicable but I think this incident is where they start putting iron into their gloves and spurs on their heels.
tarr11 11y ago
Sanders personally took a jab at Clinton during his apology, saying he wasn't sure that her campaign didn't do the same thing, but providing no evidence of that.
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- SolarNet 11y ago
  How can he when the company in question and the DNC are both for Hillary. How can they know if there is evidence with out the cooperation of those entities. Hence why they are suing to gain access to those records.
  - tarr11 11y ago
    The characterization was that Sanders is "Saturnine" while Clinton is circling the wagons and counterattacking. Clinton said that she was ready to move on from this, while Sanders is looking for an investigation. Since there's nothing else to discover about the Sanders campaign, the public and repeated calls for investigation is presumably to find a smoking gun to prosecute the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the data company for collusion and worse. Seems like a counter-attack to me.

lvspiff 11y ago

A great writeup but reading things over the only thing this shows me is Bernie's people are a lot more dedicated. if Clinton's staffers had the same level/type of access as Bernie's staffers to VAN why wouldn't they be doing the same thing? I find it hard to believe that her staffers wouldn't have noticed the data coming up as well, ran a few queries to realize what was going on, and suddenly realized what was going on and possibly make another couple queries to see what the other was doing. But that would be only if they were actually up and active at the hour the upgrade went into place which from reports sounds like they were not. On a side note - wonder what happened to the VAN QA guy?

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>if Clinton's staffers had the same level/type of access as Bernie's staffers to VAN why wouldn't they be doing the same thing? Because they firmly believe that she is inevitable, or perhaps even entitled to the nomination. Hell, Hillary talks like that herself: >"I would just ask that when this nomination is wrapped up that they come and join with us to make sure that we don't turn the White House back over to the Republicans," she added.[1] Her donors talk the same way: >“Let Bernie outraise her — he’s not going to be the nominee,” a top donor said. “The idea that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz could actually be the president is going to be the greatest fundraising mechanism in the history of the world, and it’s just too early for that.”[2] They don't think this is an election. They think it's a coronation. [1] -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/22/hillary-clinton-tells-bernie-sanders-backers-when-this-nomination-is-wrapped-up-join-me/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12... [2] -- http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-fundraising-hillary-clinton-217063 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-fundrai...
- venomsnake 11y ago
  I think that Hilary may be known in the future as the one that lost presidency twice. Pundits are greatly underestimating the anti establishment sentiments in the populace. And the Hilary supporters I know right now are smugger than crosfitting vegans. Hubris is the easiest path to a politician downfall and there is quite a lot of it in Hilary's warehouse. Edit: I also don't think that Bill really wants her to be president. His legacy turns from - ruled during the best years of Pax Americana to the husband of the first woman president. I would not be surprised if he pulls his punches.

kevando 11y ago

The DNC is like a company that Sanders doesn't work for.

tdaltonc 11y ago

The frien-nemy relationship that this database represents is super interesting. So each candidate has their own columns in the database. Does that me that, for example, if the governor of California (Dem) endorses a candidate for president, they will share their columns with that candidate? I'm imagining a crypto-key getting plugged into a Mandrill scrips at campaign HQ, and suddenly the emails get 5% more effective.

e40 11y ago
Yes, once an endorsement takes place they will share data. It goes further than that, though. Once someone drops out of a race and shares data, donations to the endorsed candidate require a kickback to the original candidate. I don't know the magnitude of the kickback, but the thing I wonder is this: is that money tainted and under the rules of the FEC? Or, can it be spent on anything the once-candidate desires? This just shows how dirty money makes politics.

Lambent_Cactus 11y ago

Really disappointed they went with the bloodless "Datagate" when "VANghazi" was available.

sandworm101 11y ago
Watergate involved wrongdoing by republican staffers. Bengazi (allegedly) involved wrongdoing by democrats. So there is little debate as to which descriptor a democrat would adopt to attack a fellow democrat. But the use of "gate" does show the age of the candidates. I'd bet most under 30s in the US do not link 'gate' with watergate.
- wetmore 11y ago
  > I'd bet most under 30s in the US do not link 'gate' with watergate Doubt it. I'm 24. First of all, we obviously learned about Watergate in high school history. Moreover, ever since Watergate happened, people have been overusing the "gate" suffix. Just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate%22_suffix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate...

sandworm101 11y ago

Lol, one of fields in the VAN database is "Zodiac Sign". Americans are weird.

feld 11y ago
A sucker is born every minute, and often identify by their Zodiac
- MaysonL 11y ago
  Whenever asked my sign, I reply (with Nasruddin) "No Parking".
wmil 11y ago
They're probably trying to track teens who are involved politically. They want to know when they turn 18. Asking for a Zodiac Sign is less creepy than asking for a birthday.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  From looking at the image in the OP, they aren't asking 'what's your sign'. It seems a sorting feature. They have the birthdates (not hard to get really) but the software thinks someone might want to sort that list by sign.
- ConceptJunkie 11y ago
  No, no it's not.
anonbanker 11y ago
If you only knew how many politicians find the zodiac to be an essential part of their lives, you would be even more frightened.

ChrisAntaki 11y ago

Interesting article, though it left out some context. The Sanders campaign tried to report this issue months ago [1]. Nathaniel Pearlman, the founder of NGP, now NGP VAN, was CTO of Hillary's 2008 run for president [2]. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Chair of the DNC, was campaign co-chair of Hillary's 2008 run for president [3]. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, has criticized the DNC for being biased against the Sanders campaign several times [4] [5]. [1] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/263730-report-sanders-campaign-told-dnc-of-data-issue-months-ago http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26373... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Pearlman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Pearlman [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz [4] https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1119794974699764 https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1119794974699764 [5] https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1120402367972358 https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/1120402367972358

idbehold 11y ago
It wasn't the same issue and it wasn't even an issue with the same vendor (NGP VAN).
- ChrisAntaki 11y ago
  Could you send a source? I'm seeing this [1]: > Michael Briggs, a Sanders campaign spokesman, told ABC News that the “vendor who runs the DNC's voter file program continues to make serious errors” and that the “the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns” has failed “on more than one occasion.” [1] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/263730-report-sanders-campaign-told-dnc-of-data-issue-months-ago http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26373...
  - randhacker 11y ago
    The spokesman was incorrect, the October incident was not from NGP VAN. From their press release: "Josh Uretsky, the former National Data Director for the Sanders campaign confirmed on MSNBC (at 5:47), and also on CNN, regarding the previous incident: 'it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system.'" [1][2] [1] http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy [2] http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-campaign-staffer-speaks-out-588356675888?cid=sm_tw_msnbc http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-camp...

yaur 11y ago

The thing I don't understand here... How you can you write a multitenant app where protecting an EAV store is a critical feature and not have tests that validate that your security still works that run before every deploy.

olefoo 11y ago
If you live and breathe good software engineering practices; it's sometimes hard to realize that the actual practice in industry varies wildly. From shops where everything flows through the CI server to shops where whoever last pushed to production is the source of all user visible bugs... I have; within the last 6 months, dealt with a team that was reluctant to adopt version control and for whom 'push to production' meant firing up filezilla. They are doing better now but they authored and support several ecommerce apps that handle millions in orders every year. So, yeah; I believe it.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  A few decades ago I worked at a place where the master source code lived in a tape filing cabinet, accessible to nearly anyone.
gnaritas 11y ago
Do you realize the vast majority of apps out in the real world have no tests at all?

skwirl 11y ago

A much different take from another person with extensive experience with the system in question: http://iowastartingline.com/2015/12/19/sanders-campaigns-reckless-reaction-to-data-breach-is-a-danger-to-all-democrats/ http://iowastartingline.com/2015/12/19/sanders-campaigns-rec... The person who wrote the submitted article is a self described socialist. The person who wrote the article I linked to volunteered for the Clinton campaign in 2008. It doesn't matter how much expertise you have in a system when politics is involved. Politics is going to taint your view. There needs to be an independent outside investigation. Personally, I thought the author of the submitted article painted a picture of a serious breach and then tried to downplay it by pointing out that it was not an even more serious.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

betolink 11y ago

Although a little long this video compilation helps to understand key differences between Hillary and Sanders. These differences can be extrapolated to how both campaigns handled the "datagate". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpm4rjejFgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpm4rjejFgQ

platz 11y ago

> The two essential scores are those for support — how likely the voter is to be supportive of the candidate — and “turnout” — how likely the person is to vote (the product of these terms being the likelihood that they turn out and vote for the campaign’s candidate). Is there an assumption then that Support and Turnout are statistically Independent?

anonbanker 11y ago

all of this smells suspiciously of what the RNC did with Ron Paul. What'll really clinch it is if BS gets all the votes, but due to vote tampering (and refusing people at the primaries) Clinton wins.