On Thursday, December 17th at 11:47 p.m., the Washington Post broke a
story reporting Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had cut off presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign access to the DNC's master 50-state voter file managed for the DNC under a sole-source contract, by NGP VAN Inc., a private political data services vendor. Schultz accuses a VAN data base system expert working for the Sanders campaign of intentionally breaching VAN system security firewalls to gain access to Hillary Clintion’s campaign data about voters.
Chairwoman Schultz intentionally misrepresents the facts after the Sanders campaign VAN administrator stumbled upon and investigated a VAN software bug introduced Wednesday morning, December 16th, at approximately 10:40 AM, when NGP VAN, the company whose software hosts the Democratic National Committee’s voter file, installed a routine software update. The update introduced a bug that allowed members of Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, among others, to filter the voter records they share using custom “scores” each campaign had independently tagged to those common voter records. Such custom scores tagged by individual campaigns are to be private to those campaigns, but the bug exposed that campaign specific scoring as public data to all VAN users. (about which more shortly).
Josh Uretsky was the Sanders campaign’s National Data Director who discovered NGP VAN had opened every candidate's campaign data for viewing by every other NGP VAN client user.
WaPo headlined its story,
"DNC penalizes Sanders campaign for improper access of Clinton voter data," with a lead paragraph reporting,
"Officials with the Democratic National Committee
have accused the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of
improperly accessing confidential voter information gathered by the
rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, according to several party
officials." The article's third paragraph said, "The
discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders
campaign’s access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic
voters." The DNC had shut down access Wednesday morning.
That WaPo news headline replaced the day's headline story that Sen. Sanders received
endorsements from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America union, secured 88.9 percent of 270,000 votes cast in Democracy for America’s official endorsement poll, and received a
record 2 million campaign contributions, with over $2 million raised in just 72 hours.
The initial Thursday night Washington Post story
and all subsequent stories through the day Friday were clearly
originally sourced from individuals at the DNC and NGP VAN. The frame of that sourced reporting
- "Sanders campaign gained improper access to" and "breached" Clinton data - gives the
impression Sanders campaign staffers with malice of forethought hacked system security to access Clinton campaign data. The DNC seemingly used that same framing language in notifying the Clinton
campaign its data had been breach through four Sanders campaign VAN/VoteBuilder
userids.
DNC Chair Wasserman Schultz, by taking the story public, stating to Washington Post reporters and other reporters she cut off Sanders campaign access to the DNC's voter information database, because Sanders' campaign staff had "improperly accessed confidential voter information of Hillary Clinton's campaign" and that "cutting the Sanders' campaign's access is the only way we can make sure we can protect our significant asset that is the voter file," Schultz instantly flipped Sanders' news momentum for the week, leading into the Saturday Democratic debate, from positive to negative.