A Bernie Sanders staffer was just fired for improperly poking around in a Clinton campaign voter file, which means that person's now job hunting several weeks before the rest of their colleagues. (Haha, j/k Bernie supporters, the campaign's not going away, they're totally in it to win it til November for sure.)
For now, details on the data leak are few. Was it espionage, or bad judgement, or some poor lackey getting thrown under a bus to protect higher-ups? Hard to say, but apparently it's not the first time that Democratic voter data has been exposed. Your privacy matters, just not as much as winning an election.
When Target lets hackers get ahold of your financial info, you get free credit monitoring for a year. What do we get from the Democratic party when they expose our details? Probably nothing, other than a vague sense of unease. We don't even know exactly what information got out, and who saw it, and whether it's still floating around.
All we know so far is that everyone's pointing the finger at a company called NGP VAN that maintains a bunch of databases and technology for various Democrats. The company itself sounds like a cool bunch of dads, with their "about us" page boasting "free beer every Friday, an annual company-widehackathon, regular events, fun retreats in sunny places, a company softball team, free drinks + snacks, and all the memes you could ever hope for." I hope for no memes, but tell me more about the free beer.
According to the Sanders campaign, a "low level staffer" noticed that the company had accidentally exposed a bunch of data from the Clinton campaign. That person went on a little snooping trip while their colleagues alerted the DNC. When the Sanders campaign found out that someone on their team had looked where they shouldn't, the staffer was immediately fired. Merry Christmas to you, staffer.
But the drama doesn't end there: the DNC has now cut off the Sanders campaign from accessing any voter data whatsoever until they can prove that they didn't save any of the Clinton campaign data. Harsh! What is so magical about the Clinton data? What could they possibly know about us that is so top-secret important? I hope it's the location of my glasses, I've been looking for them for about a week and as far as I'm concerned that's the only useful piece of information about me.
This move by the DNC is kind of a temporary hog-tying of the Sanders campaign — without that data, they'll have a hard time doing any kind of outreach to voters. And gee whiz, there's a Democratic debate this weekend. It's probably the worst possible time to suddenly have your address book yanked away from you. It's almost as if the DNC is trying to make life harder for Sanders.
In any event, Bernie may be in a particularly unhappy mood for the next day or two. So don't be surprised if, when you text him your congratulations after the debate, he replies, "new phone, who is this?"
