Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

I included the DNC data breach story in my LinkSwarm roundup, but the more I look at it, the less the story seems like “data breach by Bernie Sanders team” and more like “dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s team.”

Here’s a description by Slashdot poster Chris Johnson that states the case:

NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.

A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.

One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.

The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.

I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.

In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)

And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.

This seems consistent with the facts, consistent with the DNC being “all in” on the Hillary coronation, and consistent with the Sanders campaign suing the DNC for access to their own freaking data.

Says the Sanders campaign:

by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.

We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.

What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.

The incident is also consistent with Hillary’s own repeated Nixonian dishonesty. It’s not enough that she has the weakest slate of primary challengers for a non-incumbent since Nelson Rockefeller decided to bow out and let Nixon have the GOP nomination in 1960. Hillary is so used to winning through lies and dirty tricks she does it even when she doesn’t need to. It’s simply who she is.