WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party has cut off Bernie Sanders’ access to its massive voter database — a crucial tool presidential candidates rely on to target their operations — after it learned that Sanders campaign employees tapped into the private files of rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The act of online campaign espionage, and the potential it has to hurt insurgent Sanders at a do-or-die moment in the campaign, underscores the ever-growing role data play in modern presidential campaigns, where resources are marshaled around precise formulas that factor in such details as where voters live, what magazines they read and even their latest purchases at big-box retailers.
The Sanders campaign says it fired the employee who made the decision to snoop on the Clinton files. “After discussion with the DNC, it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign,” said a statement from campaign spokesman Michael Briggs. “That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was immediately fired.”
Sources close to the breach, first reported by the Washington Post, say a few other employees also accessed the Clinton data, but did so under the direction of the fired worker, who helped lead the campaign’s digital efforts.
The ex-employee, Josh Uretsky, told CNN that he wasn’t trying to steal Clinton data but rather trying to understand the gap in security in the system.
“To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the campaign any benefit,” he told the network.
The Democratic National Committee is scrambling to decide on an appropriate punishment for the campaign just a day ahead of the candidates’ final debate of the year. Every day Sanders is deprived of the national voter file could prove costly. Campaign officials acknowledged the bad judgment call, but they also laid blame on the firm that manages the giant voter file for the party, NGP VAN. Briggs said that the data file has been exposed to breaches for months, and the Sanders campaign itself had been warning about it.
“Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC’s voter file program continues to make serious errors,” Briggs said in the statement.
Briggs said the glitches in the software have also made the Sanders campaign vulnerable. “We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes by the DNC’s vendor also have made our records vulnerable,” Briggs said.
The DNC said it asked NGP VAN to figure out what happened and to audit its system.
“The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it,” communications director Luis Miranda said. “We are working with our campaigns and the vendor to have full clarity on the extent of the breach.”
Regardless of how things ultimately shake out, the transgression is an unsettling reminder for both political parties of how data systems thought to be bulletproof are exposed to new vulnerabilities constantly, as engineers make daily modifications in their bid to out-muscle the competition with new tools and algorithms. In this case, the firewall that NGP VAN had built to keep rival campaigns from accessing one another’s information had temporarily come down as the result of a bug, according to company CEO Stu Trevelyan.
“We are confident at this point that no campaigns have access to or have retained any voter file data of any other clients, with one possible exception, which is the Sanders campaign,” he said.
He tried to minimize the effect of the bug, saying that only for a brief window were some data for one campaign viewable by others but that they couldn’t export, save or act on it.
The company conducted an audit once it realized data had been unprotected, Trevelyan said, and discovered the breach by the Sanders campaign.
“This bug was a brief isolated issue,” Trevelyan said. “We have thousands of automated tests and extensive code review and release procedures in place to prevent these types of issues and will add more.”
The DNC is also considering an audit by an independent firm, a party official said.
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