What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?(jacobinmag.com) |
What Really Happened With the DNC’s “Datagate”?(jacobinmag.com) |
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-sanders-campaign-is-takin...
There's a big difference between Obama and Hillary, where he's pretty saturnine about attacks on him even when they get pretty crazy, and she takes things more personally and circles the wagons and counterattacks.
Did you mean between Sanders and Hillary? Or are you referring to past election?
The Sanders campaign tried to report this issue months ago [1]. Nathaniel Pearlman, the founder of NGP, now NGP VAN, was CTO of Hillary's 2008 run for president [2]. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Chair of the DNC, was campaign co-chair of Hillary's 2008 run for president [3]. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, has criticized the DNC for being biased against the Sanders campaign several times [4] [5].
[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26373...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Pearlman
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz
The data director (who was fired) corrected his statement on MSNBC saying “it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system" [1]
I would also say that all the conspiracy theories about connections between Clinton and NGP VAN are insane. You can take any other tech company in this space and find just as many connections to the Clintons. If you've been involved in democratic politics at any point in the last two decades, chances are you can be linked back to Bill or Hillary.
That being said, I'm by no means defending the DNC's actions or saying that I think they have or have not been fair to Sanders... All I'm saying is scrounging for links between companies and Clinton is a waste of time.
[1] http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-camp...
http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-campaign-data-breach-co...
"On Reddit, an r/technology thread about the controversy included comment from a self-identified 2008 Obama campaign staffer who claimed such breaches were both common but of limited strategic value:
"As an '08 Obama staffer who used the VAN extensively, it went down like this, "Oh, that's weird. It looks like we can pull lists from Hillary again. Hey Erin, do a quick search..." Then everyone in the office room (there were 4 total accounts who did a search) tried the search too.
Any data they pulled would not have been that useful, especially considering both campaigns use the VAN. They couldn't just turn around and re-enter the Clinton supporters as 5's, etc. That's not how it works ... The breach is a non-issue, however how it is being handled by the DNC (in addition to the way the debates, etc) is the telling issue about how undemocratic the Democratic National Party has become.""
Partway through my search I found one source, not primary, claiming that NGP VAN was not at fault, but that's it. Can anyone find anything else?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2...
"Weaver blamed the DNC and its vendor for failing to protect the data. He said the Sanders campaign contacted the DNC about an earlier firewall failure in October, and he feels “very confident” that some of the Sanders’ campaign data was lost to another campaign then. That system was not controlled by NGP VAN, the company notes."
It's interesting that essentially the same issue has happened with two different systems. Assuming the phrase "firewall failure" is meant the same way... The technical doublespeak is really starting to get on my nerves. The use of the term "firewall," it seems, is explicitly to make people think a "hacking" was done.
I'm seeing this [1]:
> Michael Briggs, a Sanders campaign spokesman, told ABC News that the “vendor who runs the DNC's voter file program continues to make serious errors” and that the “the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns” has failed “on more than one occasion.”
[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26373...
I would not be surprised if Aristotle wasn't one of the six customers to which Georgia sent the data. They have been collecting voter data for years; I worked there for a few months more than 15 year ago, and they already had a nationwide database mostly loaded from 9-track tape.
http://iowastartingline.com/2015/12/19/sanders-campaigns-rec...
The person who wrote the submitted article is a self described socialist. The person who wrote the article I linked to volunteered for the Clinton campaign in 2008.
It doesn't matter how much expertise you have in a system when politics is involved. Politics is going to taint your view. There needs to be an independent outside investigation.
Personally, I thought the author of the submitted article painted a picture of a serious breach and then tried to downplay it by pointing out that it was not an even more serious.
This just shows how dirty money makes politics.
But the use of "gate" does show the age of the candidates. I'd bet most under 30s in the US do not link 'gate' with watergate.
Doubt it. I'm 24. First of all, we obviously learned about Watergate in high school history. Moreover, ever since Watergate happened, people have been overusing the "gate" suffix. Just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_with_%22-gate...
Sucks that Uretsky couldn't help himself to get a sense of what the Clinton camp was thinking tho
Anyone who says metadata is harmless hasn't been paying attention for quite some time.
And why is it legal for ANYONE to (ab)use the public voter register for ANY kind of gain, be it personal, commercial or political?
(note: I'm from Germany, where politicians aren't totally crazy)
Americans are weird.
I have; within the last 6 months, dealt with a team that was reluctant to adopt version control and for whom 'push to production' meant firing up filezilla. They are doing better now but they authored and support several ecommerce apps that handle millions in orders every year.
So, yeah; I believe it.
Is there an assumption then that Support and Turnout are statistically Independent?
On a side note - wonder what happened to the VAN QA guy?
Because they firmly believe that she is inevitable, or perhaps even entitled to the nomination. Hell, Hillary talks like that herself:
>"I would just ask that when this nomination is wrapped up that they come and join with us to make sure that we don't turn the White House back over to the Republicans," she added.[1]
Her donors talk the same way:
>“Let Bernie outraise her — he’s not going to be the nominee,” a top donor said. “The idea that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz could actually be the president is going to be the greatest fundraising mechanism in the history of the world, and it’s just too early for that.”[2]
They don't think this is an election. They think it's a coronation.
[1] -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12...
[2] -- http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-fundrai...
Pundits are greatly underestimating the anti establishment sentiments in the populace. And the Hilary supporters I know right now are smugger than crosfitting vegans. Hubris is the easiest path to a politician downfall and there is quite a lot of it in Hilary's warehouse.
Edit: I also don't think that Bill really wants her to be president. His legacy turns from - ruled during the best years of Pax Americana to the husband of the first woman president. I would not be surprised if he pulls his punches.
> Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economically, or socially. It is a system designed for the creation and preservation of capital, not human life. I’m a socialist because I believe that the wealth of society can best be harnessed through cooperation, not competition.
I fully support having a genuine contest of ideologies to see who can kill fewer people and save more lives, with greater health and happiness! But that means we have to admit, in the first place, that capitalism kills, which is more honesty than we get out of most people in Western societies today.
As a subscriber, I do think most of us would settle for the abolition of bourgeois class-status rather than bourgeois lives, when it comes to it.
#1 The USA (mostly) requires voters be "registered" prior to voting. Whereas most modern democracies like Germany have universal registration.
#2 USA (mostly) uses first past the post (aka winner takes all) whereas a quick googling suggests Germany uses proportional representation. So in the USA, when 50% + 1 is a victory, every vote counts.
Consequently, voter registration and get out the vote (GOTV) have become central to campaigns in the USA. Also called ballot chasing.
These quirks (and others) in USA elections have created a campaigning arms race, leading to ever more costly elections.
Well you know, except that one time...
Never had a mailing, a person at my door, etc.. and neither has anyone I know from my knowledge. However, it is definitely possible.
But I do find it incredibly worrying how much data campaigns can get their hands on in the USA - I'm pretty sure Australia's rules regarding access to the electoral roll pretty much prohibit it ever being used to target voters in a campaign.
But isn't the point of this to help the campaigns identify and avoid people like yourself who would not welcome their advances.
But in any case the legal answer is simpler: political calls are explicitly exempt from the various no-call lists and telemarketing laws (in the U.S.), so they don't really need any justification for why they put you on the list.
Assembling a detailed profile of an individual in the US is quite expensive, for very fine-grained values (think dossier, history-of-life levels) of "detailed", if you are putting together a mass marketing campaign. The actual publicly-available voter data however, is relatively straightforward and is necessary to prevent basic voting fraud. US citizens who participate as election judges can get this data. The data as described in the article is the voter's name, address of record (determines which elections they may participate in, like local referendums), and which elections they participated in. If they participate in primaries, it notes which primary, but this is far from a solid indication that a specific voter is Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Socialist, etc.; they could be participating to try to help throw a primary to select a weaker candidate against their preferred candidate, they could simply be expressing a preference for particular opposition candidate they admire, etc.
As an aside, that common complaint from techies "this solution was shoved down our throats by management, we were not given a choice?" That's precisely because while at work, techies tend as a group to treat the sales and marketers cold calling techies as "intrusive-as-hell", turning away even respectful cold calls with disdain, while managers as a group tend to give pitches more of a cautious hearing-out.
Earlier in my career, taking all cold calls, out of curiosity because I realized I didn't know everything there was to know about every field, and driving the conversation quickly to establish potential ROI for my organization, helped give me a boost because while my managers got the recognition, they remembered who brought in the idea in the first place when it came time for promotions and raises.
Only a fraction of the cold calls I took panned out, but they usually only lasted 5-10 minutes each (many of which I redirected and then took during my lunches), I only got 1-3 a week at most (lots of weeks no cold calls), I nearly always learned a new aspect about a technology I didn't know before, I almost always networked with a new technologist/engineer (getting their personal email let me keep up with them, and some of these contacts paid off down the road), and I only needed one or two suggestions to my managers to pay off every other year or so. On those that I saw promise in, I would invest more time in off-hours (vendors are always willing to meet with you at convenient times for you) to investigate. Even if a suggestion is turned down by management, as long as I couched it in business benefits, with a quantified presentation, it raised my profile to my managers as business-aware, and helped me later establish a gatekeeper role in technology selection. I have more specific, detailed tips I've accumulated over the years to make the process efficient, but it mostly boiled down to know what you want out of the call you are taking and be up front with it in a friendly way.
But when I'm at home and relaxing, and someone tries to sell me bullshit, I get really really mad. It's just disrespectful to intrude into others' personal lives - TV/radio/internet commercials already do that enough.
There's even weirder stuff: more than half of the states allow people to declare their party affiliation when registering to vote anonymously. Some of them use those declarations to limit access to the primary elections and I'm sure they are very useful in the gerrymandering phase.
It's really the lowest possible form of democracy. The next step is the single party system.
Given that politicians of all colors and countries mostly listen to whomever lines their coffers, we already have this system.
"Josh Uretsky, the former National Data Director for the Sanders campaign confirmed on MSNBC (at 5:47), and also on CNN, regarding the previous incident: 'it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system.'" [1][2]
[1] http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy [2] http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-camp...
Whatever the case, what confuses me are the suggestions that these sorts of breaches are common and that they have been for some time. What the hell are these software vendors doing? Access control is nothing new. And while getting it right isn't always easy, there's no reason for you to continuously get it wrong, either. It's also really easy to test, comparatively speaking, because potential issues here are predictable.
From their press release:
"Josh Uretsky, the former National Data Director for the Sanders campaign confirmed on MSNBC (at 5:47), and also on CNN, regarding the previous incident: 'it wasn’t actually within the VAN VoteBuilder system, it was another system.'" [1][2]
[1] http://blog.ngpvan.com/data-security-and-privacy [2] http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/fired-sanders-camp...
That unfortunately perpetuates a vicious cycle, because with only minimal effort, technical staff can easily get a respected seat at the gatekeepers' table, and vastly mitigate the "management picking vendors' technical solution" issue. That very characterization of which illustrates the depth to which technical staff misunderstand what is really going on, because it really should be called "management picking the ROI and solutions to business' challenges, in the absence of proactive solutions put up by technical staff for consideration".
Clinton said that she was ready to move on from this, while Sanders is looking for an investigation.
Since there's nothing else to discover about the Sanders campaign, the public and repeated calls for investigation is presumably to find a smoking gun to prosecute the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the data company for collusion and worse.
Seems like a counter-attack to me.
I trust her less that I trust Trump, and that's not at all.
It amazes me that Sanders isn't going guns-a-blazing with all the Scandals and Corruption that emanates from the Clinton name brand.
Why look for the needle in a haystack when you have a stack of needles sitting next to the haystack?
https://www.google.com/search?q=video+of+hillary+lying&rlz=1...
There, ftfy.
The characterization was of Obama, not Sanders. Or at least that's what the post says right now.
What about Romney and McCain?
Um... that is exactly why we call them murderous. Because they killed people. A lot of them. In cold blood.
Socialism is great, until you read a history book or look at its actual implementation. And no, don't bring up northern EU states that actually depend on quite free market capitalism to finance it (as well as unrealistic monocultures that are unrealistic for the USA, and lead to morally reprehensible immigration restrictions to keep the systems from being overwhelmed)