What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”? (from Jacobin) [View all]

[drokhole]

What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”? (Jacobin)

The definitive explanation of the Democratic National Committee’s “Datagate” scandal and what the mainstream media got wrong.
by Björn Westergard

Last Wednesday morning around 10:40 AM, NGP VAN, the company whose software hosts the Democratic National Committee’s voter file, released a routine software update. The update introduced a bug that allowed members of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, among others, to filter the voter records they share using “scores” they do not share (about which more shortly). For the next hour or so, members of Sanders’ staff ran twenty-five searches using scores generated by the Clinton campaign; their intentions in doing so are now the subject of heated dispute. By noon, NGP VAN staff were aware of the issue and had taken steps to fix it.

By Friday, the DNC — which brokers access to VAN/VoteBuilder and mediates disputes between its users — went public with the story and ordered NGP VAN to deny the Sanders campaign access. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook accused the Sanders campaign of deliberately stealing data to gain a competitive edge. The Sanders campaign fired its data director, Josh Uretsky, and Uretsky, taking full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, insisted they had only intended to document the problem. Hoping for an injunction to regain access, the Sanders camp sued the DNC in federal court.

By Friday evening, the DNC had given the go-ahead for access to be restored, and by Saturday morning it had been. As a practical matter, the story ends here. But recriminations continue.

I was a software developer for NGP VAN from the summer of 2011 through the spring of 2015, having first heard of the company as a volunteer in the 2008 Obama primary campaign. While at NGP VAN, I contributed to a system through which the scores at the center of this dispute can be loaded into the voter file. The Voter Activation Network (“the VAN”), which the DNC brands as “VoteBuilder,” is also employed by foreign political parties, the AFL-CIO, NGOs, and — surprisingly, for a brief period in 2013 — Uber.

Amusing as it’s been to find that some of the technical minutiae of my old job has become a hot topic of conversation, coverage of the story so far has been tendentious and often plainly inaccurate. The Clinton campaign has exploited the obscurity of the software and the institutional context in which it’s used to grossly mischaracterize the actions of Sanders staffers. That said, Uretsky’s statements of intent do not accord with the logs released by NGP VAN.

more at the link