[Forgive me if it appears that I’m wearing a bit more tin foil than usual, but I’m part of the way through The Devil’s Chessboard and realize that in the past I never put enough tin foil on my hat to correctly perceive hot “ratfucking” works.]
Bloomberg is reporting Sanders Accounts Saved Clinton Data During Breach, Audit Says
Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign exploited a temporary glitch in the Democratic National Committee’s voter database to save lists created by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to an audit of the breach obtained by Bloomberg.
Sanders’ campaign has sought to downplay the severity of the incident, initially saying that only a single “low-level” staffer accessed the Clinton data and that none of it was saved. But the database’s logs created by the vendor that manages the data, NGP VAN, shows that four accounts associated with the Sanders team took advantage of the Wednesday morning breach.
Staffers conducted searches that would be especially advantageous to the campaign, including lists of its likeliest supporters in 10 early voting states, including Iowa and New Hampshire.
The DNC has now suspended the Sanders’ campaign from using the DNC database.
Bad, bad Sanders. How dare he claim that he would run a totally ethical campaign and then engage in a spying operation against the Clinton campaign.
Aspects of this scandal that must be ignored:
- NGP VAN principle(s) is a Clinton supporter.
- DNC chair DWS is totally “Ready for Hillary.”
- DNC runs to WaPo and levels charges against the Sanders’ campaign before collecting the evidence. (Recall the FBI claim of pro-ISIS Facebook posts by the SB killers?)
- Yesterday was a good day for the Sanders’ campaign with the CWS and DFA endorsements, but this “scandal” will dominate in the news.
- Tomorrow is the third DEM primary debate. This “scandal” should be expected to play a prominent role.
Charlie is correctly questioning how this matter hit WaPo so quickly. But he shuns tin foil and is satisfied to accept that the DNC system glitch was merely serendipitous.
Good “ratfuckers” never leave their fingerprints on the operation. Once targets/scapegoats/fall guys have taken the hit, anything else involved that would point to additional operatives can plausibly look like accidents or human errors with no harm to others intended.(Except to suspicious or paranoid minds.) Compartmentalizing the operation details is also valuable.
If you smell a rat, consider the possible culprits and scenarios. (If you don’t, you blame Nader and not team Jeb! dirty tricks in FL 2000.)
First up, unfortunately this has to be considered, is Josh Uretsky, the former Sanders campaign’s National Data Director. On CNN he denied having engaged in anything nefarious.
Uretsky, who is experienced with the NGP-VAN system used by the DNC and has administered it before, said he first noticed the data breach on Wednesday morning.
“We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign’s exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor,” he said. “We did not gain any material benefit.”
NGP-Van has acknowledged that they created the system glitch that dropped the firewalls between the campaigns. Therefore, Uretsky and other Sanders’ IT people did not hack the system to Clinton data or voter models. [Sidenote: NGP-VAN purchased the Obama 2012 voter model system.] Did Uretsky attempt to gain a “material benefit” but failed when the system was quickly shut down? Is there any evidence that Uretsky isn’t how he’s claimed to be, an IT professional not employed or affiliated with any other faction or candidate?
From his Linkendin page it’s a stretch to speculate that Uretsky isn’t who he was thought to be. Or that he didn’t fit within a national campaign for Bernie. Whether or not he would be above some independent dirty tricks to benefit Sanders cannot be assessed from the limited information currently available.
More from Uretsky:
“This wasn’t the first time we identified a bad breach,” he said, confirming to CNN that the Sanders campaign reported another breach to the DNC in October. “We reported it to them. They thanked us for reporting it and they told us the breach had been closed.”
“In retrospect, I got a little panicky because our data was totally exposed, too,” Uretsky said of how he handled the latest breach. ” We had to have an assessment, and understand of how broad the exposure was and I had to document it so that I could try to calm down and think about what actually happened so that I could figure out how to protect our stuff.
Note that Uretsky was hired in September and he/Sanders’ team identified and reported a breach in the DNC system in October and had been thanked by the system vendor for finding it. Had no inadvertent firewall breaches occured before then? Have the Clinton and/or DNC IT folks ever seen and reported any breaches? Was the October glitch noticed by anyone outside Sanders’ team?
Reportedly, the glitch on Wednesday resulted from a system patch entered mid-morning. It’s my understanding the such patches are done in off-hours and not during peak user time. When was the October patch entered? Note:
the database’s logs created by the vendor that manages the data, NGP VAN, shows that four accounts associated with the Sanders team took advantage of the Wednesday morning breach.
So, wouldn’t NGP-VAN also have such records from October and could construct the process the Sanders’ IT went through to verify the existence of a breach before reporting it?
Allen Dulles once said that he enjoyed watching mice nibble on planted cheese. Or past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior in similar situations.
So far, Sanders’ supporters are doing their best to dismiss this as a minor mistake and blaming the vendor for creating the glitch and DNC for suspending Sanders’ access to the system and unknown actors for running off to the media. Also applauding Sanders’ quick action in firing Uretsky and turning off the computers of others suspected of having done something wrong.
Clinton supporters are screaming as loudly as possible that what Sanders’ employees did is on the level of the Watergate break-in.
While that second faction has good reasons for promulgating any possible negative against Sanders, the other faction seems as naive about ratfucking as ACORN and PP employees were. (Recall the rush to judgment (one measure of the effectiveness of a ratfuck operation): In immediate response to the 2009 video controversy, the United States House and Senate, by wide margins, attached amendments to pending spending legislation that would temporarily prohibit the federal government from funding ACORN, or any agency that had been involved in similar scandals — including money authorized by previous legislation. President Obama signed the bill into law on October 1.) If this DNC database breach is a ratfuck, it’s conceptually high-tech and sophisticated. So far, working as good as, if not better than expected.
Sanders’ team is working with what they have and also pointing a big finger at the DNC according to this AP report.
The presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders angrily accused the Democratic National Committee of trying to “undermine our campaign” by barring it from a voter database Friday after a breach enabled his staff to improperly access information compiled by rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“Clearly, in this case, they are trying to help the Clinton campaign,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said.
DWS is doubling down:
…once the committee became aware “that the Sanders campaign had inappropriately and systematically accessed Clinton campaign data,” it directed its vendor to suspend Sanders’ campaign access to the information.
No evidence of “systematically accessed Clinton campaign data.” But why bother with facts when sliming an opponent is so much easier?
From the following, Billmon”s nose is twitching:
A summary of computer logs shows that four aides to Sanders’ presidential campaign accessed proprietary voter data compiled by Clinton’s campaign and some of the aides saved the voter information, according to a person familiar with the data logs and the breach.
The person said the data represented millions of dollars invested by the Clinton campaign. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
(A note of caution, it didn’t need a conspircacy to promulgate it. OTOH, it evolved so quickly that it’s unlikely to have been a low-level, independent rat that did it. Stick a piece of cheese in front of DWS and she’ll do the expected.)
Clinton’s campaign declined comment on the incident.
Isn’t that special? Or familiar.
I’m sure this will all get sorted out at some future date. When it no longer matters how history was changed and the meese are dead.
UPDATE: Petition Bernie, 2016 Inc. vs. DNC
Impressive fast action on the part of Sanders’ attorneys. Interesting read. A key point is made at the top of page 4 — the contract between the DNC and campaigns includes termination procedures for either party in the event one of them breaches the contract. Upon notification of a breach by the non-breaching party, the breaching party is allowed ten days to cure the breach before any action can be taken by the other party. It has yet to be determined if the Sanders’ campaign breached the contract, but the DNC most definitely breached it.
In a statement, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz refused to rule out permanently denying the Sanders campaign access to its data. She said she personally reached out to the senator “to make sure that he is aware of the situation”, and that once the DNC receives a full report from his campaign, “we will make a determination on re-enabling the campaign’s access to the system”.
And for the record,
The Clinton campaign manager also hesitated when asked if any of his staff had access to Sanders’ records, saying he was sure no one had “reached into Bernie Sanders’ data and extracted it in the way that the Bernie Sanders campaign did this week”.
A very lawyerly type of statement. Interesting that the Clinton campaign manager is more informed about whatever Sanders’ data guy did than Sanders’ campaign manager.
While many are running with anonymous quotes at to what Sanders’ staffers did and also accepting the firing of two of his staffers as an admission of guilt (anyone remember the Obama administration rush to judgment and firing of Shirley Sherrod?), NGP-VAN has issued an official statement and included in it is:
On Wednesday morning, there was a release of VAN code. Unfortunately, it contained a bug. For a brief window, the voter data that is always searchable across campaigns in VoteBuilder included client scores it should not have, on a specific part of the VAN system. So for voters that a user already had access to, that user was able to search by and view (but not export or save or act on) some attributes that came from another campaign.
So, what could Sanders’ staffers have saved during the 30-40 minute breach that they didn’t already have full access to?
UPDATE #2 – breaking
JUST IN: From Sanders campaign: access to voter files will be restored Saturday morning.
Perhaps that lawsuit woke a few people up to potentially larger problems.
Buzzfeed – Sanders Campaign Manager: DNC Actively Undermining Our Campaign. This aspect of the DNC shutdown of Sanders’ campaign access was neglected in the early reporting on this story:
Marie, you seem to be good at this, certainly better than me.
Nathaniel Goss Pearlman who founded the NGP half of the software company handling the DNC computers was Hillary’s chief technology person in 2008.
Is Nathaniel in any way related to Porter Goss?
Haven’t a clue as to a familial relationship between Pearlman and Goss. Would guess not recent nor active.
Cool isn’t it that Pearlman could be in such an excellent position to run this scam on behalf of Clinton with no contact on this operation between him and her campaign?
Also, I have The Devil’s Chessboard and plan to read it after I get through Peter Levenda’s trilogy.
You’re in for a great read. Familiarity with many of the facts in it didn’t prepare me for viewing those facts in an integrated and more complete narrative.
See my earlier post – Wasserman-Schultz Coronation Queen for Clinton?.
Latest from WaPo – The DNC needs to restore Bernie Sanders’ access to voter data — fast.
So for starters, even if this was planned (Which I’m not sure if it was or wasn’t planned, but it’s a stupid plan to count on the absolute stupidity of your opponent but the rewards are usually worth it when those plans rarely work out. I wouldn’t put it past certain people though to do this.), it’s not a ratfucking incident, it’s a “honey pot” incident. The honey pot was set out under a box and the Sanders Data and IT team walked right up and stuck their hand in like stupid and arrogant morons. Worse than just sticking their hand in however they actually at the honey while also taking the meta physical equivalent of selfies of themselves eating the Honey.
There was nothing on Earth that made the Sanders Data and IT team go looking for voter support data and voter turnout data specifically. There was even less reason to SAVE that data as ‘proof.’
From Crooks and Liars:
To my understanding ratfucking is something you do to someone else. This is entirely self inflicted.
And no amount of stating the truth that D.W.S. is an incompetent moron (And she really is an icompetent moron, just to be clear that that bit isn’t sarcastic at all!) is going to change the fact that the Sanders Data and IT team screwed the pooch royally and that at least one of the is likely to see federal prison time.
So perhaps, maybe you should have waited for more information before calling out the conspiracy spirits to save Bernie. It might have saved you from another “I smell a CIA ratfuck because ISIS can’t have video production and editing tech that advanced.” moment.
And maybe you should wait until more than an anonymous source from the vendor or DNC characterizes what was done by Sanders’ IT during the breach. If we’re all honest, how many people don’t snoop on others when given the opportunity to do so? (I actually don’t and it has often driven others mad that I don’t possess certain secrets that would have been easy for me to obtain.)
Did you miss the part where the database manager would have been privy to the process employed by Uretsky to verify a system programming error that allowed for a breach? And how long it took Sanders’ team to do that in October.
“Ratfucking” is twisting the normal into the nefarious. While “honeypot” is generally a sting involving the use of sex to discredit or gain information from a target, I suppose one could expand the term to mean any sting that includes personal greed/desire on the part of the target, but then the term becomes too broad to be of much use.
ACORN and PP employees behaved properly when confronted by the frauds engaged in ratfucking. If the DNC database glitch was nothing but a relatively ordinary but serious inadvertent error and Sanders’ IT people handled it as such (both of which I allowed could be the case in my diary), there was no ratfucking nor ethical breach at the Sanders’ campaign. However, that begs the question of why the swift DNC action and public reporting.
You and several reporters appear to have concluded that team Sanders did steal data for campaign gain. As if they were just hanging around for that firewall to the Clinton data dropped and they could quickly scoop up data in the few minutes before the wall went back up. That sounds a bit crazy to me, particularly given the time of day the database patch was made. (OTOH, when money drops from the sky, people do act quickly to grab it.) Yet you’re not suspicious at all as to the speed of the DNC and timing of the whole think — from breach to public disclosure.
Honey Pot is a specific IT (Ignore the sales pitches. They do decent IT definitions however.) term as well.
As a legal and ethical matter, it’s only legal and ethical to document a glitch and security breach of your access to other people’s data with the express consent of the owner of the database and the owner of the data being stored. The Sanders data and IT team had neither. Therefore it is unethical and illegal.
That D.W.S. is an opportunistic parasite putting her thumb on the scales for Clinton is irrelevant. It’s part of the major reason I concede point blank that it may have been a setup.
But the thing is, even if it is a setup, the Sanders data and IT team still screwed the pooch.
Another problem with your explanation is that it requires us to believe that a politicians data and IT team just so happened to discover a glitch in a shared database that gave them the keys to the otherside’s data kingdom to which they then proceeded to methodically and systemically sort and process the other sides complete donor and turnout lists in two states that they are either loosing or competing neck-and-neck in, save all of said data to their own servers and accounts, lie repeatedly about having done so, and lie about the seniority of the persons involved in the whole process, but we are supposed to believe that the whole thing was a benign and altruistic attempt to merely document a massive glitch? That none of the saved data that would be IMENSELY valuable and helpful in targeting and flipping voters would not just so happen to be used to give the Sanders Campaign an edge?
In what world is that even a likely scenario? Sure it could happen. But it could happen that the both of us could split a multi-million dollar lottery winning as well. It doesn’t mean that it’s anywhere near likely.
No matter how you look at this, the Sanders data and IT team screwed up. They didn’t properly document their work, they saved personal data belonging to someone else to their personal computers, and they either lied about what they did to the PR team or the PR team lied about what went on to the press.
Those first two just so happen to be the difference between felonies and legally allowable IT work in every state in the Union.
Now ask yourself this, if you have to be the disgusting individual that is D.W.S. for just a few hours and someone comes in and tells you that you’ve got the Sanders campaign by the balls in what looks like a multiple felony data breech of your preferred candidate, would you slow play this or would you run as fast as you can to a friendly megaphone paper and shout from the roof tops about what was going on? Especially if you as D.W.S. had engineered to dangle the bait in from of the Sanders Team and they took it?
D.W.S. was being D.W.S. just like you imagine. And for as odious as that is, her rushing to the WaPo is exactly what anyone playing politics as a game should and would do.
Really wish IT folks wouldn’t appropriate well-known and used terms for their own specific applications and use.
Although, I doubt you are claiming that the database vendor in this case set up a “honey pot” to trap any of the campaigns.
Again, we don’t know what Sanders’ IT team did nor what their specific agreements wrt to documenting and reporting glitches are. So far we know that the DNC “screwed the pooch” in denying team Sanders access to the database — termination due to a breach is spelled out in the contract between the DNC and candidates.
Nobody denies that competitors wouldn’t love to get their hands on the data from the other campaigns. What you’re downplaying is the incredibly short window of opportunity (either serendipitous or on purpose) in which Sanders’ team could possibly have done their dirty deeds. Let’s not overlook that it’s not being reported as a Clinton data firewall that came down, but the system firewall for all the campaigns. Thus, Sanders’ data was as vulnerable to capture by the other campaigns as Clinton’s was. Wouldn’t protecting and preserving one’s employer’s proprietary data take precedence over attempting to steal the data of other campaigns?
Maybe? It depends on what the persons specific value of the data in question is. If you are sure that your stuff won’t help the other side as much as the other sides stuff will help you, then you probably roll that die.
As the Sanders campaign is the underdog and Sanders voters are perceived to be much less likely to swing to be a Clinton vote than a Clinton voter to a Sanders voter, I would find it much more likely that the Sanders team would think their own data is mostly useless to the Clinton campaign than the Clinton campaign’s data would be of much greater value.
This would also seem to fit the actual behavior of the Sanders data and IT team than what you are trying to make their behavior seem. There are all kinds of ways for the Sanders data and IT team to document the glitch without saving any kind of proprietary Clinton campaign data. None of what the Sanders data and IT team did in any way, shape, or form protected the Sanders data. If these lists were stored in hard copy in the same room and the Sanders team heard that all the locks were busted on the filing cabinets, going and riffling through the Clinton filing cabinets, selecting certain data, and then making photo copies of that data would in no way make the Sanders data in the Sanders filing cabinets safer.
I’m a big believer in “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I think the same must hold true for altruism. There is simply no good reason to believe that the Sanders data and IT team just so happened to decide to document this glitch with those particular searches and decide to save those particular files for purely altruistic reasons.
And you can bet your ass that if the situation is reversed you wouldn’t be giving the Clinton campaign the same benefit of the doubt. And rightly so. But nothing the Sanders Campaign has done in this incident has pointed to altruism as being a likely factor. I’d be more than willing to believe the whole thing is stupidity on the part of everyone, but I can find no evidence that anyone is clean here. There are no ways that a political campaign by any candidate should ever be given such a huge benefit of the doubt.
Sanders data comes from new voters outside the usual Democratic voter base. Clinton’s base is accumulated over 25 years and likely on everything but psychographics and recent transactions likely mirrors the DNC base from Obama’s campaign.
Whether Clinton’s team would see any possibility of attracting Sanders’s base depends on what is in there. If it mostly overlaps their base, why bother. If it has lots of class-aware pickups, they would have to decide whether that is a useful demographic or not.
The relatively rapid restoration of service to Sanders’s campaign after suit tells me that once each campaign saw what the other had, they decided that security was more valuable than exploitation regardless of what happened. Or they judged that to be the case earlier. The fact is that candidates have to build their own lists out of their own logic of which voters will vote for them.
Impediments to imagining what my response would be if the situation were reversed and a Clinton staffer had viewed Sanders’ proprietary data are 1) the vendor and DNC would have to be controlled by long-term Sanders associates and 2) the Clinton campaign responded as quickly and factually within the time constraints Sanders’ campaign did. If that existed, it’s difficult for me to imagine that I would have responded differently — IOW defending Clinton and being suspicious of Sanders and his associates. To the best of my ability, I generally mentally test out my responses to events by flipping the actors to the other side. I also weigh the seriousness of the issue (IOW am I making a mountain out of a molehill which does seem rife to me in all political partisan battles.) Then allow for perfectly normal human responses that don’t reflect deep and negative character issues of the actors (IOW want any reasonable person would do under similar circumstances). You will note that not once have I ever criticized Hillary for anything she did or didn’t do wrt Benghazi. I did find her use of a personal and private server and e-mail address as troubling b/c government work belongs in the custody of government. As for security issues with the private server or classified communications being sent to her, that’s of no interest to me and therefore, not a subject that I criticized.
From the Sanders’ lawsuit:
Someone or someones straightened out the prior incident without turning it into a Clinton v. Obama campaign issue. IMHO that was appropriate for a “molehill” as is the current “unintentional transmission.” From the NGP VAN statement intent based on the current known actions of the Sanders’ IT guy can’t be unquestionably defined. Does seem clear that the peek at Clinton campaign data wouldn’t have been of any use to Sanders and therefore, no harm to Clinton.
(Have you never been privy to information that could help you and hurt someone else and done and/or said nothing about it? I have. In one instance, I didn’t have quite enough information to know if the actions were illegal or merely unethical; so, I did/said nothing. The actor in this situation was later busted by the SEC, but they couldn’t even get a conviction on charges that appeared to be far more serious than the one I’d been privy to.)
Nathaniel Goss Pearlman (born October 7, 1965, in Manhattan, New York and raised in Boulder, Colorado) is an American political technology consultant aligned with the Democratic Party. In 1997, he founded NGP Software, Inc., a company which provides political software to a majority of federal Democrats including most Democratic candidates for President (including Dean, Gephardt, Kerry, Graham, Edwards, Obama, and Clinton) in both 2004 and 2008. He was chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and an early practitioner in the area of computers and politics. In 2010, NGP Software merged with the Voter Activation Network to become NGP VAN.
○ ARISTOTLE INTERNATIONAL, INC., Plaintiff, vs. NGP SOFTWARE, INC., Defendant. [pdf]
○ Margin of Victory: How Technologists Help Politicians Win Elections
Well, guess we can’t eliminate the possibility of a GOP/rightwing ratfuck. Expanding the range/number of individuals or factions that could possibly want to hurt the target is another good way for culprits to hide their tracks.
What I understand from the first statement from the company is that voter data was only released for voters that both campaigns had contacted and that what was shared were “atrributes” from the other campaign. This is ambiguous. Did the user get back additional “attributes” (that is, the equivalent of columns in a table) or did they get back additional attibute values (that is, the equivalent of rows in a table)?
Someone looking at the data they are expecting to see and seeing more of it would expect that the same phenomenon was being experienced on the other side.
Moreover, from the description, it is possible for the bug to generate the logs of queries with additional attributes that expose user action from the other campaign, whether they were saving files from another campaign or not.
The bug is peculiar. The relationships between the vendor and the campaigns are peculiar. And the behavior of the Chair of the DNC has been most peculiar this election season.
It might not even be any of the campaigns involved but actors from parts of the establishment outside the DNC. It wouldn’t be the first time that establishment figures have ratfucked the Democratic Party when there was a candidate they feared winning. Muskie, Eagleton, McGovern, Carter, Gore, Kerry all come to mind in one way or another as having gotten sabotaged by dirty tricks that go way beyond the Dick Tuck satire.
Given the way things have been going, pissing off the hacker community might not be wise for the Democratic Party and certainly is not wise for the establishment.
Don’t even dismiss the possibility of Breitbarting. Remember that James O’Keefe was not caught until he had already positioned himself in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s telecommunications wiring closet.
Shutting down the Sanders’s campaign’s access does more that preventing access; it does it with all of Sanders’s data on the inside of an insecure database. All the screaming publicly about 24 saved lists ignores the fact that IT personnel who allowed a bug into the system (again) and failed to notify customers of the breach decided to shut down only one of the campaigns although the breach never was formally proved to no longer exist. That vendor can no longer pitch with “Just trust us.” Critical application and too cheap to fire up a test bed and drive bugs out before deploying to production.
Quite frankly, shared anything with the current state party and DNC infrastructures is taking a big risk. Was signing into this application part of what Bernie was required to do to prove his Democratic bona fides? How exactly did he get into this situation with data?
How exactly are campaign IT managers who don’t trust each other to diagnose a bug in the absence due diligence and prompt action by the vendor? If the Democratic candidates can’t run DNC’s IT effectively, just imagine what the intelligence community’s IT will do to them if they win.
Quite frankly, shared anything with the current state party and DNC infrastructures is taking a big risk.
I haven’t seen one person on Twitter have anything good to say about NDP-VAN’s software/program. I’ve seen many complain that it sucks and they only use it because everyone does. If that’s not a racket, I don’t know what is. You’re right. Who do the Democrats have such crappy IT people running things?
Here’s what my spidey sense says about the requirements. The database is set up to allow a quick merge of primary data into general data and the partition of last cycle’s general election data to each of the party-approved candidates as a supplement to merge with their own gathered data as a start. At that point the partition restrictions go up. The winning nominee gets the benefit of other candidates’ work and the partitions come down. In a unified party and under normal party operations it makes a lot of sense from the perspective of the party.
The problem is that that sort of conditional security and access is difficult to keep bullet-proof as changes are made in the functioning of the system.
This issue should have been settled the first time it appeared, which according to the Sanders campaign’s IT manager was back in September. If my assumption of the requirements that required the joint storage of data is true, the data itself is to a degree actually stored uniquely over all campaigns but only for the values of attributes that they all share. Or at least that might be the requirement that allows the DNC to send mailings to the entire database without requiring transaction data that the candidates would consider confidential.
If you do a straightforward analysis of the functional and data requirements of a single campaign and the functional and data requirements of a party aiming to reduce the cost of campaigning for all campaign in the standard civics book model of campaigns and a party, it is easy to see that at some point party interests move to commingling unique voter identities from multiple sources controlled by individual campaigns even if it is not completely commingled in practice. The party wants one database to bind them; the candidates want their own sandbox. The compromise was on when the data became common to the party–when the primary elections were settled and there was a nominee. The selection of a nominee at the convention might be a milestone.
If my speculation is even close to correct, all of the partitioning is new code built since the 2012 Obama election. As a single candidate, Obama did not need the complications multi-candidate support would require. And being new code, it is more likely to be buggy. And if it is buggy, it is buggy for all campaigns when bugs occur. Does the DNC have a protocol for how individual campaigns report security bugs and how the work on those bugs is tracked and reported back to the campaigns? That is not as straightforward as it looks because each of the campaigns must have assurance that the system is in fact chosing no favorites and that there is determination on the vendor to ensure that security issues are promptly closed or there will be the “rush to the exits” response that you saw yesterday even if there were absolutely no chicanery at all in the events. Sensitivities are that high. And the DNC is that mistrusted.
Whether Bernie’s campaign exploited the breach is irrelevant to judging Sanders in fact. He swiftly fired the individuals accused. This is a political decision, no a legal one; it was necessary and the IT manager understood that it was necessary. But Sanders also went to court to escalate the fact that after three months, the security issues of shared campaign data had not been fixed. The Clinton campaign went to the media. As far as the story goes, it is not clear that the breaches to anyone’s campaign have been closed as yet. And if they were, it would not be a public announcement.
Now that this has gotten a high media profile, Democrats need to ask themselves who else but the Democratic competitors have the capabilities to compromise a system like the NGP-VAN system? Around 20 governments in the world; a number of private security firms contracted for exploits; one multi-billion-dollar US government agency; several convention centers worth of computer and network professionals; a large amorphous underground network of hackers and wannabe hackers. And even the question “Cui bono?” also brings out another sizeable list.
The knife-edge questions between investigative reporting and tinfoil hattery is, “Did it in fact happen? How could we tell?” It might, it could have, but did it?
When those are the first questions that occur to lots of citizens we are very far from trusting the way our system operates. Unfortunately, after 50 years of betrayals it is difficult to write that attitude off to blind cynicism.
The Democratic Party is beginning to have as many tragedies as the Kennedy family.
BTW, Trump is not as likely to go down through dirty tricks as Democrats are. His friends in the casino and construction businesses don’t enjoy other folks playing that way.
The proper way for DNC to have dealt with this issue is with the candidates themselves and not their staffs and certainly not in the media. Like White House chiefs of staff, DNC chairs used to be invisible operators and not PR flaks. Do you even remember off the top of your head who was DNC chair during LBJ’s presidency?
The parties have become so fragmented that there is no longer party unity in practical terms on either side. And the solvent that allowed this to happen is large amounts of money independent from party control. Unity however is a double-edged, especially if it’s financially forced. It is the dysfunction in American politics that keeps coming back to bite.
Larry O’Brien near the end of LBJ’s term and was back in the position ’70-’72. However, as he’d also been JFK’s, LBJ’s, and HHH’s national presidential campaign director, he was better known than most, but Watergate may have been what raised his national profile the most.
I was a young’un during O’Brien’s leadership of the DNC. I first knew him as the Commissioner of the National Basketball Association, and didn’t know about his political work until I read a couple of the detailed Watergate reportings as an adult.
It was a good lesson in my continuing education about people who gain these powerful positions. They’re general organizational people who are courtiers to millionaires; most often they enter the position as millionaires themselves. Those attributes almost always are prioritized in the hiring decisions; having expertise in the profession of the organization has little to no importance.
The cool thing about living through periods of time and later reading historical accounts of those periods is being able to compare the differences. So much isn’t known in real time. However, historical accounts lose some of the reality. The former sensitizes one to the need to look more closely in real time and not quickly dismiss what seems odd or irrelevant. The later is useful to remind oneself and others of what it was really like for people in those times.
For example, when rightwingers long for the 1950s, they blot out the ugliness and destructiveness of the commie witch hunts and Jim Crow, illegality of contraception and abortion, truly second class citizenship of women. Then they inflate the actual economic well-being of those that were doing well for that time. As if the Father Knows Best physical standard of living was the norm when it was closer to that of The Honeymooners. What was prevalent during the two and a half decades after WWII is that almost everybody didn’t a tiny bit better with each year. So much so, that few noticed when that stopped (in part because instead of rising incomes, consumer credit became freely available).
The real history in many areas is complicated and rarely clear-cut. As an example, Labor unionization in the United States was at its highest in the 1950’s. Because of this strong and broader-based access to collective bargaining and the cultural and political power this gave to working class whites, the percentage of white Americans who were able to gain middle-class incomes became very high during that period.
Unfortunately, this access to the middle class was not shared by non-whites. There were many factors which caused the poverty level for African-Americans and other minorities to remain shamefully high into the 1960’s. I claim that chief among them was the denial of civil rights and the vote to minorities, the failure of Federal, State and local governance to support minority communities, and highly unequal access to collective bargaining for non-white workers.
Unfortunately, the Labor movement I love was divided on the civil rights movement. While the UAW joined other portions of the Labor movement to organize behind the movement, other portions did not. Labor was also divided on the Vietnam War and the movement to reduce the power of the military-industrial-political complex. So, when the conservative movement entered into its decades-long, completely counterfactual claims that the Great Society programs did not reduce poverty in the United States, or that the post-Vietnam Defense budget was a necessary investment of Federal funds, there was not a unified Labor movement to counter the lies.
It’s important to remember that this lack of unity was not brought about by decisions made by Labor leaders alone. Those Labor leaders were responding to strong feelings and statements by their rank-and-file.
The rest of the liberal/progressive movement was also less than unified as well in pushing against these right-wing campaigns. As an example, you and I can agree generally that Senator Boxer has almost always represented our liberal policy views, but she has also defended Defense Department funding which finances public and private sector jobs in California.
Neither history and the actions of powerful leaders are black and white. It’s good for all of us, myself included, to maintain humility while making our historical summaries and drawing our conclusions. Making our summaries as broadly factual as possible is helpful in bringing that humility, I believe.
Leaders lead. That includes articulating and persuading the followers why it’s in their interests to do X even if their prejudices/biases push them to do Y.
It’s why I have no patience for politicians that never move a step (and often encourage prejudice and inequality) until public opinion has shifted in favor of doing the right thing. DOMA was unacceptable. However, more specifically and limited to Hillary on her own came eight years later in this egregious display of hypocrisy and unfairness:
And no, I don’t want to hear that she “evolved.” Once the issue was raised, the answer for principled people was quick and easy.
It’s best when politicians help lead the public to a better position. But politicians don’t gain or keep power when they hold prominent positions which voters strongly oppose. And we should avoid mischaracterizing this issue, and also avoid mischaracterizing how other big policy changes have been accomplished.
It’s no accident that one of the very first politicians to take strong action on behalf of implementing same-sex marriage was the mayor of San Francisco. Mayor Newsom’s action to authorize the City and County of San Francisco to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples was morally right, and was helpful to the long-term politics on the marriage issue. It was also illegal at the time and hurtful to the short-term political outcomes for liberal politicians and issues in the United States.
DOMA was bad policy, I believe. I don’t know that DOMA was a necessary political compromise, either in order to stave off even more extreme Federal policies regarding marriage law, or for Clinton’s re-election campaign. However, it did represent the views of the majority of Americans at the time, many of whom remained easy to mobilize electorally on the issue for some time.
I do not believe that your claim that this was a “quick and easy” issue represents reality. I’ll say for myself that, while I was not strenuously opposed to the movement trying to create same-sex marriage rights, I was also not in support of it and considered it an exotic, boutique issue long after DOMA was passed.
By the time Mayor Newsom took his action, I had come around and knew that the displays of joy from normal-looking Americans in the San Francisco ceremonies would derive long-term moral and political benefits. I didn’t support all the views that Clinton held in the Senate floor speech you share here. However, it’s almost certain that Senator Clinton was representing the views of a plurality or majority of New Yorkers that day.
In this vein, it’s no accident that broad access to interracial marriage, contraception and abortion, and civil rights were led by judicial decisions rather than the will of politicians who must be responsive to issues voters care about.
We want politicians who follow. That’s representational democracy. Politicians who lead and don’t follow could do things like eviscerate the New Deal and Great Society programs that you and I care about. The only President Bush and Congress didn’t do so when they had control of all Legislative branches of government is that the voters did not support them doing so, and when they made their strong move on Social Security anyway they were punished in the 2006 and 2008 elections, which cost them their ability to continue to lead.
Die in a plane crash. 😉
Republican pollster Michael Connell,45, of Akron was subpoenaed by a federal judge to give a deposition in a long-standing 2004 federal election fraud lawsuit.
○ Read BooMan’s Link: Robbed in Ohio
A computer glitch? Well known to happen in critical elections to keep the establishment candidate in first place!
Forgot about Connell. Thanks.
The tech aspects of the DNC system are way above my pay grade, and those that claim to be techies posting on the NGP-VAN bug and team Sanders IT access to Clinton data don’t seem to agree on much. My guess as to much of the confusion is that the architecture of the system is proprietary and what is stored in the database, along with how that data is collected and updated and how it can be used and by whom, isn’t transparent.
For example, the primary database is registered voters culled from public information. A tech version of voter lists that local and state parties have long maintained and rent out to candidates. Scrolling through, iirc, Rand Paul’s FEC financial report, I noted the purchase of the Iowa list from the state RNC. (Clinton and Sanders’ filings are way too long to casually peruse.) I’m guessing that the DNC system replaces the local and state party lists or perhaps the DNC acts as the middle-man between the local party and the candidates. All subscribing candidates have access to the entire list. It is apparently very useful for general election GOTV efforts. Have to assume that the DNC uses it for fundraising pleas as well.
System bells and whistles were apparently added to aid primary campaigns and each campaign could only access the additional data that campaign entered, (generically considered a firewall but technically an access key). Some techies have expressed confusion as to how a patch bug could take down the access key. Does that suggest that the system is more fragile/vulnerable than it should be or disabling the access key required specific action to do so? At the end of a primary, each candidates’ data would be “owned” by the DNC and available to the nominee; thus, we can glean that the access keys can be disabled.
How campaigns’ fundraising operations interact with the DNC database beats me. Is there some electronic back and forth between campaign receipts and accounting and the DNC system? Guess “download” from the DNC database is also incorrect terminology as “browse” is a download.
With the DNC agreement with the Sanders’ campaign, the public is unlikely to get any more insight into what and how the DNC voter database operates.
All DNC needs for the system to spit out for fundraising is a mailing list of names, addresses, emails, phone numbers pre-vetted for some criteria. My bets are the DNC uses old data until the firewall comes down. After all, that old data would be seen as “the base”.
I don’t whether candidates could flag some of their voters to go in the campaign list for a particular DNC event; it seems to me to complicate the system. My guess is that the DNC would rather be hobbled until the nominee is clear and that whatever merging is to facilitate crank-up of the general election campaign with the data from the losing candidates.
For the DNC, Bernie is “pre-lost”.
Wasn’t questioning its use by or usefulness of to the DNC. But as with all voter lists, they age quickly. Not even questioning why a new candidate would use the database as a launch to his/her campaign. Beyond that it raises many questions for me that I’d never thought about before. And there’s apparently a lot of competition among campaign tech companies.
Guess the 2014 lab experiment wasn’t a success. All seems like more efforts in subverting democracy than facilitating democracy. Or maybe most people don’t really care about whatever it is that passes for democracy today because it has so little to no impact on life as they see and experience it.
Well, GOTV fundamentally is about rousting people out of their houses and marching them down the street to vote even with their best of intentions.
“Eat your peas” isn’t democracy. Nor is “the lesser evil.”
I have to question then what you think Democracy is then? Because as far as I know, plurality wins and bare majority wins for positions of authority are one of the original features of the first democracies in Ancient Greece.
And as long as those are the methods we choose for our democracy, and as long as liberals are not a plurality and/or a majority in and of themselves, then yeah “Eat your peas” and “Lesser of Two Evils” are exactly what Democracy demands if liberals even want to begin to get anything they want.
As a fundamental concept of Democracy, any group that isn’t a majority in and of itself gets nothing with out the cooperation of some other group.
Last I checked actual Liberals in the US are less than 20% of the adult population, let alone the voting populations. That means Liberals are not supposed to get anything at all, without making a coalition.
Liberal public policies — not identified by party — do most certainly garner majority support.
Where democracy gets lost is that politicians and their affiliated propaganda machines lie and manipulate the people into voting against their own and the nation’s own interests.
Had the public been told that Saddam wasn’t a nice guy but posed no real risk to us would GWB have been able to get his war on? Hell, if they’d known that taking out Saddam would cost a few trillion dollars, instead of a mere $20 million that would be paid for out of Iraq’s oil revenues, would a majority have supported it?
How many Americans are informed on the origins of ISIS? Or even al Qaeda a dozen years on.?
Well… your statement is meaningless though. In fact it’s kinda delusional. Sure some liberal policies are popular with out regard to identity politics. But there are several things wrong with thinking that statement has any meaning or relevance what so ever to the situation as it actually exists.
The first thing that comes to my mind that make that line of thought not worth the joules to type, is that unless you’ve been holding out on us with a plan to end identity politics, then the actual situation on the ground is that we have identity politics and will continue to have identity politics for the foreseeable future. Which means in a conversation about what is actually happening and what to do about it, you have to deal with identity politics and shouldn’t even bring up a world where we don’t.
The second thing is that I’m not so sure that the statement is relevant even in a world without identity politics unless you can bring up every issue independently and put it to a popular vote. Even then I’m still moderately skeptical that you’d get more than 60% of the policies past without other reforms taking place first. People like ideals and policies as abstract things. They rarely like what it takes to actually get the ideals and polices into reality. Then you have to deal with the fact that even if people like the ideal or policy and are even fine with the means of getting the ideal or policy in place and paid for, they likely don’t actually care enough to go out and do something about it. Between those two conditionals and the possibility of viewing two policies as being favorable but each being represented by only one candidate then you’re going to have a system of priorities for the issues at hand.
I’m reminded of the West Wing episode about polls and the Anti-flag Burning Constitutional Amendment. In the episode a huge percentage of the population would be in favor of such an amendment, but the vast majority also didn’t care about the issue beyond the hypothetical and wouldn’t exert any energy to make it happen.
Anyone who thinks there is this vast swell of liberal voters out there just waiting to be tapped by the liberal messiah just seems to be under the same delusion that the “Moral Majority” was under.
The US population is pretty much a nice bell curve from liberal to Center-Left to “Don’t Really Care just make the trains run on time!” to Center-Right to batshit insane right wing nuts. And from all appearances at least 30% of the US population is to varying degrees in the “Don’t Care” area.
You reference a TV show as evidence and call me delusional?
Liberal policies:
public education — free to the parents and children
Social Security retirement income
Medicare
child deduction on income taxes
mortgage interest deduction
VA benefits (recall the difference for WWI and WWII vets)
public roads – free to users
minimum wage
40 hour work week
unemployment benefits
In a referendum today, do you seriously think none of those would garner a majority vote in favor? Hell, a majority supports an increase in the federal minimum wage.
We have representative democracy because we need the “deciders” to have the knowledge and smarts to see a bit down the road and not be hampered by current prejudices, etc. Doesn’t work well enough because people vote for too many stupid, corrupt, etc. politicians. But sometimes we actually get some goo-gov. And when it’s good, it’s always liberal.
I did not specifically call you delusional. I said that anyone who believes certain things is delusional. I consider those opinions to be delusional because they are testable things, which have been tested, and to continue to believe them even though all evidence and tests show the opposite to be true is kind of the definition of delusional. If there can’t be a great swell of liberal non-voters out there, because part of the definition of a liberal voter is someone who participates in their democracy, they it’s delusional to believe they are out there. And while voting is not the be-all-end-all of participation in democracy, it is a critical component that without you can’t meet the definition of participation.
If you insist on trying to make a country with deeply ingrained identity politics behave like a country without deeply held identity politics by claiming that you can get everyone to just vote for their best interest without identity politics while having no plan to actually make it happen, then yes, that is a delusional view. There is no basis in reality for a such a view. All evidence points to the fact that on occasion even when voters don’t have to engage in identity politics, voters will still vote against their own interests in large numbers and percentages. That even when it is in voters best interests to show up and vote on a single issue that directly and significantly impacts their lives and is presented as a single issue on the ballot, persons registered to vote will not show up to vote in large numbers and percentages and citizens who would be significantly effected by the ballot proposal who are not registered will not take steps to get registered and vote in large numbers and percentages.
Considering that some minimum wage increases were in fact beaten at the ballot in the past 2 years, and that people already have voting fatigue and that constant referendums on single acts will make such things worse, like I said in my prior post, I believe that only about 60% of such liberal proposals would pass overall without voting reforms prior to the move to put everything to a popular vote. I never said none of the liberal policy positions would get passed. I just said that even if identity politics was not a factor, it wouldn’t be some cake walk to get liberal policies implemented.
As to the TV show reference, it’s a great and important case of Art Imitates Life boiled into a nice ready Aesop format. None of your distaste for the format of TV, makes the point about likes and enthusiasm of voters any less real.
All of this brings us back to my main point: The US is operating within the bounds of the definition of a democracy with some plurality, some majority, and some super majority rule requirements. That there are simply not enough liberal voters to form a majority or even a plurality on our own. Therefore if we want liberal policies to be implemented, liberals must form a coalition and “Eat our Peas” and deal with “Lesser of Two Evils” until such time as liberals have managed to gain a majority or in some cases a plurality in and of themselves.
I’ll admit, I don’t have a plan to bring liberal politics to the masses. Do you? Because I’d really like to hear some good news. But if you don’t, then the only real game plan I see is slugging it out in the trenches with win some loose some politics while doing our very best to preserve what gains we have made and move the needle ever so slightly forward.
○ Sanders Campaign Regarding Software Glitch: “DNC is Relying on an Incompetent Vendor”
○ Bernie Sanders campaign declares war on the DNC | MSNBC |
○ Bernie Sanders sues DNC for $600,000 a day over removal of data access | The Guardian |
○ Clinton goes for the jugular after data breach | Politico |
○ Sanders gets the fight he wanted [ahead of debate] | Politico |
Saw on the net that Trevelyan has been working with the Clintons going back to the 1992 campaign.
In my post, from the first link:
“Stu worked directly on a number of campaigns, including working in
the 1992 Clinton-Gore “War Room,” and then in the Clinton White House.”
I get the jitters all over again!
The computer glitch on election night as the results were coming in … a black-out is intolerable!
○ Eye On Ohio: The Informed Citizen’s Guide To The 2004 Election
We’ll never know if the GOP actually succeeded in “stuffing the ballot boxes” in OH ’04. However, unlike ’00 when we didn’t have a clue that FL was being “fixed” until the results started rolling in, there was plenty of advance notice that OH was being “fixed” in ’04. Guesstimating the limits of a “fix” from FL ’00 (and Gore did manage to beat that spread), it seemed clear enough to me early on that Kerry wouldn’t beat that spread in OH and as he was poorly positioned into too many other potentially blue states, the election was essentially over after the NH primary.
(I called the 2008 general election after the Iowa caucus and 2012 GE in 2010.)
I’m digging the confirmation biases and causation/correlation confusions in play in this discussion between the two of you.
Oh, and the massive conspiracy theories made unprovable or undisprovable by their massiveness. They’re proving awfully funny as well. They’re held by many millions outside of this discussion, I’ll admit.
I’m reminded of a portion of Roger Ebert’s retrospective review of Oliver Stones’ “JFK”:
“Shortly after the film was released, I ran into Walter Cronkite and received a tongue-lashing, aimed at myself and my colleagues who had praised “JFK.” There was not, he said, a shred of truth in it. It was a mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies. It did not reflect the most elementary principles of good journalism. We should all be ashamed of ourselves.
I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions. My notion is that “JFK” is no more, or less, factual than Stone’s “Nixon” or “Gandhi,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Gladiator,” “Amistad,” “Out of Africa,” “My Dog Skip” or any other movie based on “real life.” All we can reasonably ask is that it be skillfully made and seem to approach some kind of emotional truth.
Given that standard, “JFK” is a masterpiece…
…
“JFK” will stand indefinitely as a record of how we felt. How the American people suspect there was more to it than was ever revealed. How we suspect Oswald did not act entirely alone. That there was some kind of a conspiracy. “JFK” is a brilliant reflection of our unease and paranoia, our restless dissatisfaction. On that level, it is completely factual.”
If you’re in the frame of mind to accept in whole the PermaGov idea, I can imagine it feels good to decide that the Democratic Party establishment was somehow involved in an extraordinarily massive conspiracy with the Republican Party establishment to contravene the will of the voters and maintain full control of electoral result reportings in order to assure George W. Bush would be given a second term. On that level, your conspiracy theory here regarding the 2004 election is completely factual.
Only on that level, though.
Cronkite was wrong. He may not have known it, but he was wrong.
Mexico City, proof of an a priori conspiracy. Open and closed.
Do you mistake me for Gilroy? Where have I ever endorsed the “PermaGov” perspective? My comment was about one state in one election when there was concrete and tangible information that at a minimum the OH SOS was making efforts to fix the results. Did he succeed? We’ll never know for sure will we? I merely raise this because it didn’t take much for him to succeed because in the pre-election polling, the race in OH was essentially tied. (Unlike FL where Gore did have a measurable pre-election polling lead.) And quality exit polling was dispensed with after FL 2000. Yet, somehow I correctly called OH for GWB long before election day based on three bits of information.
I’m fine with entertaining the possibilities of conspiracies, but I like my speculations limited to small conspiracies which historically we know have been quite common. IMO, all the JFK assassination conspiracy offerings suffer from being too complex and involving too many people. LHO as the lone-nut assassin doesn’t add up well except in comparison with the alternative conjectures seen to date.
Atrios
They’re all “good guys”.
We’ll see who finally has an interest in the issue by who tries to keep the issue alive now that DNC has reopened the Sanders campaign data to them for use.
Even if it was a dirty trick by someone, the best measure it take it out of the media focus and deal with it privately and and within the party machinery. If someone has solid evidence, it is best brought forward in this context after the dust has settled IMO.
It is clear that a divided Democratic vote is to someone’s advantage. Or that the “battle for the soul of the Democratic party” is not entirely about the soul.
Isn’t the debate tonight? The Democrats need the limelight, a little fireworks will arouse the folks.
Yep, for the last 24 hr news cycle the top story has not been what The Donald said.