Last Friday, information came out that there was a breach of the Clinton Campaign’s voter and private file data by several staffers within the Bernie Sanders campaign. Because of the breach, the DNC and their database services provider took the extraordinary step of suspending the Sanders Campaign’s access to their own data.
The way this was first reported, I thought it must have been some kind of political espionage.
It turns out the breach was caused by the DNC’s database services provider, NGP VAN mistakenly delivering this powerful and private data through its own website to the Sanders Campaign’s home and office computers.
We at L2 are not going to wade into the Clinton/DNC/Sanders battle over accessing that data. We will say that if the campaigns or the DNC were using L2’s data and platforms, accusations, apologies and shifting the conversation of a national campaign would not be necessary.
At L2 we take extraordinary steps to secure the data we provide and ingest from Presidential campaigns, labor unions, associations and the thousands of other organizations we serve. L2’s databases are managed in a way that prevents any organization’s private data from being shared at all without their specific permission, let alone being shared for several hours.
This technology failure at NGP VAN illustrates a fear many of our data and platform users have had for years about the security and partiality of partisan data operations. Innovation and competition drives L2 to provide the most secure platforms and best data to all of our clients regardless of affiliation, campaign, size or budget.
Party leaders and all those using partisan data shops should take time in the New Year to explore all of the options they have when it comes to their data and platform providers.
