NGP Van took responsibility.
NGP Van has a database that includes the basic voter data.
It then has for each candidate a private database that takes the basic voter data and adds the candidate's proprietary, private information and notes to that common basic database.
If you go to NGP Van's website, you learn that NGP Van had a "bug" in one of the "releases" of their database. It lasted about one hour and 40 minutes. It gave permission to Bernie's campaign to view Hillary's data, to search it and save it to folders -- which I assume necessarily stayed on the NGP Van website.
Someone from Bernie's campaign went into that combined database which included its information as well as Hillary's and did searches. The searches were phrased so that they could have either had the purpose of ascertaining that Hillary's information was in the database provided by the vendor NGP Van to Bernie's campaign and the extent and types of Hillary's information that was provided to Bernie's campaign, OR it could have had the purpose of actually obtaining and looking at the details of Hillary's campaign. Not much viewing could have been done in an hour and 40 minutes. Little would be retained unless the viewer had a photographic memory.
Hard to tell which purpose the Bernie campaign employee had unless he has said something about his purpose. NGP Van stated on its website that one item was exported by one campaign.
A prior similar breach occurred in October at which time, I gather, the Bernie campaign believed that its website was accessed by another campaign. Bernie's campaign reported it.
NGP Van has stated that it was not the vendor involved in the October breach.
So that is the story.
The DNC has been pro-Hillary and has employed many pro-Hillary employees from the get-go.
This does not reflect on Bernie personally at all. Someone in his campaign may or may not have overreached in reviewing the data on the website.
But when you think in terms of what the employee saw going into the database, here is how it worked.
The employee went in to find Bernie's data. There is no accusation that a Bernie employee intentionally sought access to Hillary data when he/she entered the website. Clearly at that point the intention of the Bernie employee was to query Bernie information.
But what did the employee, the Bernie employee find? Hillary information was there, probably mixed up with Bernie's data.
If you have ever worked with a database, like say Google, you can find a lot of stuff on there that is not of interest to you. You query it to ask a question. That's what we know that Bernie's employee did. He/she asked for information just like you do when you Google. The questions he asked, the information he requested identified Hillary data. Like Hillary's list of voters who are strongly favoring Hillary. It was something like that. I am not quoting.
Bernie's staff did not seek access to Hillary's information. They received it due to a mistake by the vendor who was most likely contractually responsible for protecting the privacy of the data of each of the campaigns.
If I had been looking at the website, I might well have wanted to ascertain what the extent and quality of the mixing of the data was and would have queried for Hillary's data in precisely the obvious way the Bernie's staff did. This is especially likely since Bernie had experienced a similar breach with a website managed by a different company in October.
The searches that were made were obviously for Hillary's information and were made in a manner that insured that the website managing company, NGP Van could trace the history of the searches. That is what makes me think that the searches were not intended to obtain the information so much as to be able to prove the nature and extent of the breach. Bernie's first thought would be to protect its own information. Bernie's campaign could benefit from Hillary's information to a certain extent, but more important to Bernie's campaign would be protecting its own information from Hillary's (probably much larger) staff.
I think this matter should be investigated by a truly independent and qualified outsider.
I hope that Bernie continues to press his lawsuit on this matter.
And in the meantime, Debbie Wasserman Schultz needs to go. Bernie is drawing crowds of over a thousand people at a time in Iowa. In the same or similar geographic venues, Hillary is drawing crowds in the low hundreds. Hillary must be getting desperate. No doubt this accusation against Bernie's campaign was made so rashly and without a thorough discussion with Bernie because Hillary is getting scared. She is a weak candidate, a vulnerable candidate, and her platform is not selling.
So I hope you rethink your decision.
Thanks.
NGP Van's statement is here. Here is an excerpt:
First, a one page-style report containing summary data on a list was saved out of VoteBuilder by one Sanders user. This is what some people have referred to as the “export” from VoteBuilder. As noted below, users were unable to export lists of people.
http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy
= new reply since forum marked as read
first post ignore. .............
