The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign gave its national data director the boot after he took advantage of a software glitch in a voter database managed by a third party to gain unauthorized access to proprietary modeling data from Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Josh Uretsky was fired with the Sanders campaign communications director Michael Briggs calling the behavior “unacceptable” in a statement. The Democratic National Convention suspended the Sanders's campaign's access to the database.
“The D.N.C. was notified on Wednesday by its data systems vendor NGP VAN that as a result of a software patch, all users on the system across Democratic campaigns were inadvertently able to access some data belonging to other campaigns for a brief window,” said the New York Times quoted the DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda as saying.
The Times also noted that NGP VAN CEO Stu Treveylan called the incident “isolated” and said the company is “conducting a full audit to ensure the integrity of the system and reporting the findings to the D.N.C.”
But in his statement, Briggs also said that “On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns,” and claimed that “months ago” the Sanders campaign had “alerted the D.N.C. to the fact that campaign data was being made available to other campaigns. At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor.”
Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that four user accounts linked to the Sanders campaign had searched the database while Clinton's information was explosed.
