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Would love to hear more and see if we can't collaborate on this. My email is seth AT amicushq DOT com.
i'll fire an email your way shortly. but yea, a conversation would be great.
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Here's an interview the Sanders campaign staffer who was fired gave explaining just what you describe: http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-camp...
Wow, that interview is incredibly hostile.
If this guy wants to help the campaign (which he obviously still do) he should stop giving more interviews.
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If you open it up with addresses/phone/email-addresses, beware that the main users may be commercial marketers (i.e. junk mail senders), not campaigns. Also note that many states license the data with a restriction that it only be used for election purposes.
if I define open as, "your campaign would have to register and be verified"...then it abides by the state/fed rules for these datasets. I can't just throw the data on github.
It's not obvious to me how open access to this data would be intrinsicly bad, but I suppose that relies on the assumption that it's equally available to all parties (which may not (definitely not?)) be the case.
any pointers to the statuatory/regulatory guidelines would be appreciated.
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Having actually used NGP-VAN, I think it's far more likely that this was a bug, not a conspiracy. The VAN is a real clunker in many ways, so it's not surprising that a bug like this would appear; and public exposure of a conspiracy to sabotage Sanders would be so catastrophic to the Clinton campaign that I think it's highly unlikely that NGP-VAN would do it.
As someone who has had... shall we say, intimate interactions with NGP-VAN's code base, the idea being floated by some Sanders supporters that this is a DNC conspiracy and not a bug is hilarious.
It sounds like the data director of the Sanders campaign was the only member who could initially access Clinton data--would this not go both ways?
If such extreme bugs were the norm, why would the DNC continue to use such a vendor? The entire platform the DNC depends upon is hindered each time such a bug happens, so it makes no sense from an organizational perspective.
Conspiracy is a strong word, but it seems a bit naive to look at this as either "is a bug" or "isn't a bug".
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if I define open as, "your campaign would have to register and be verified"...then it abides by the state/fed rules for these datasets. I can't just throw the data on github.
Can you comment on this a bit? It's not obvious to me how open access to this data would be intrinsicly bad, but I suppose that relies on the assumption that it's equally available to all parties (which may not (definitely not?)) be the case. any pointers to the statuatory/regulatory guidelines would be appreciated.
For those that are not familiar with the space, campaigns typically use voter contact software to record the results of the conversations they have with potential voters on the phones, at the doors, and over the Internet. In this case, the voter contact software that both the Hillary and Sanders campaigns were using, NGP VAN, had a bug which allowed both campaigns to access each other's private, proprietary data (in…
Difficulty level in replicating this dataset from secretary of state rolls?
Nationbuilder, a sorta-competitor to NGP, has put together a national voter file and it's reasonably priced. https://elections.nationbuilder.com/about/faq
The DNC/NGP voter file, however, is significantly enhanced - for one, it's got a lot of phone numbers, which most states don't include in their lists. There's a lot of other survey and consumer data associated.
For a national voter file that's good enough to use for say a City Council race anywhere in the country, where all you want to know is "who is likely to vote in this non-presidential election", it's doable but very expensive. For anything serious, it's pretty much outside of capabilities of anyone but the parties and some of the very big SuperPACs/very big orgs.
For those that are not familiar with the space, campaigns typically use voter contact software to record the results of the conversations they have with potential voters on the phones, at the doors, and over the Internet. In this case, the voter contact software that both the Hillary and Sanders campaigns were using, NGP VAN, had a bug which allowed both campaigns to access each other's private, proprietary data (in…
For an alternative perspective: "The database logs created by NGP VAN show 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. Campaigns rent access to a master file of DNC voter infor…
The phrasing here strikes me as somewhat vague. Are they implying that Weaver's statements are in conflict with the audit logs, or are they (somewhat ineffectively) implying that "saving lists" merely equates to bookmarking a certain query?
NGP stated:
"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."
What exactly do they mean by "view", let alone "act on"? If someone was truly dedicated to extracting data through their browser, are the terms truly mutually exclusive?
[1] - http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-18/sander...
[2] - http://heavy.com/news/2015/12/josh-uretsky-bernie-sanders-ca...
edit: added source
If you believe the Sanders camp, this sounds a lot like the Instagram bug bounty issue [1] that appeared on HN recently. Someone from the Sanders campaign identified a bug and to prove their was an issue grabbed private data that they should have never had the ability to access. That is questionable ethically whether they looked at the data or not. The DNC also can't immediately tell if it is the truth or if the data…
Every time something like this happens, non-technical people don't know how to respond to it. Just look at the DNC Chairwoman's response[0], "That is just like if you walked into someone's home when the door was unlocked and took things that don't belong to you in order to use them for your own benefit." Essentially, "gray-hat" hacking isn't always seen as a friendly warning to the vulnerable as much as it might be a…