Sanders camp suspends two more staffers over data breach

[Algernon Moncrieff]

24. OK. They didn't hack. If you leave your door open, is it OK for strangers to enter and look around?

I refer you to this article that I also posted in GD: P

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/12/heres-what-actually-happened-great-sanders-clinton-data-theft

Today, however, David Atkins has weighed in [see update below], and he does know how the software is set up. I don't know his loyalties in the presidential race, but he nonetheless seems to have a pretty solid take on the whole thing:

[An] important piece of information to note is the difference between a "saved search" and a "saved list."...You really only want to pull a static list if you're doing something specific like creating a list for a targeted mail piece—or if you want a quick snapshot in time of a raw voter list.

....However, the access logs do show that Sanders staff pulled not one but multiple lists—not searches, but lists—a fact that shows intent to export and use. And the lists were highly sensitive material. News reports have indicated that the data was "sent to personal folders" of the campaign staffers—but those refer to personal folders within NGPVAN, which are near useless without the ability to export the data locally....Even without being to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as "strong yes" votes would be a valuable piece of oppo.

...This doesn't mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn't, in David Axelrod's words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign....Still, the Sanders camp's reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton's data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn't honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord.... What's very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.