The fact that the DNC data breach happened, and that the Sanders lawsuit is apparently continuing, may end up being good for Democrats as a whole and for all Democratic campaigns going forward.
The data breach is shining a light not just on the technology vendor at the heart of the issue, but also on the extreme level of control over candidates it has put into the hands of the head of the DNC. It's also revealing the vulnerability of putting the party's vital data into one set of corporate hands and keeping it there, not necessarily for reasons of technical excellence, but for purely political reasons:
At the heart of the Bernie Sanders data mess is a firm that functions as the digital plumbing of the Democratic Party: NGP VAN. Democrats are nearly wholly dependent on it, which is why the breach — the company says it’s the first in its nearly 20-year history — and the Sanders campaign’s subsequent cutoff from the system is so rattling the party...
If nothing else, it’s reminded Democrats of the risks of leaning so heavily on one private company to provide its technology infrastructure...
Nearly every Democratic campaign across the U.S. uses NGP VAN in some fashion, though critics say that's due in some part to the fact that the DNC and state Democratic parties force candidates do so as part of the package of receiving party support. The arrangement leaves it up to the Democratic Party to decide which campaigns get access to the software, giving it an enormous gatekeeping power of which the Sanders' campaign felt the force during its temporary suspension of access to the data file...
The VAN part of NGP VAN started in the late 1990s as the Voter Activation Network, built for the Iowa Senate campaign for Tom Harkin when he couldn't find the software he needed for his campaign. A powerful feature was the fact that it could maintain campaign records and recycle the data for use by other campaigns. Howard Dean, when he headed the DNC, saw the value of it and started using it for his 50-State Strategy.
In 2010, Sullivan's company merged with NGP, a Washington, D.C., fundraising software company led by Clinton-Gore veteran Stu Trevelyan. It was the marriage of two progressive software powerhouses, and it helped Democrats, for the first time, bridge the management of their donor base with their shoe-leather field organizing...
The firm has, in recent years, been locked in battles of words and, in some cases, lawsuits, with competitors, including Aristotle and Nationbuilder, the latter of which has made its name letting users control access to their own data but which has earned the ire of some in Democratic circles by working with Republicans...
But at the moment, Democrats remain enormously dependent on NGP VAN, and that's likely to continue for the near future...The company has an all-you-can-eat contract with the Democratic Party, meaning that it is paid the same year in and year out, no matter how many campaigns actually use its tools...
The Sanders case “highlights a huge vulnerability in Democratic tech," says Seth Bannon, a progressive technologist who runs the digital advocacy software company Amicus. "Locking campaigns into a tool because of a company's political connections at the DNC is a very dangerous thing.”
I hope that the Sanders campaign doesn't drop their lawsuit, and that it forces the DNC to allow an audit of not just what happened in this particular data breach, but of the security of the whole system provided by this vendor.
And not an audit by NGP-VAN of itself, as Debbie Wassermann Schultz wanted, but by a respected and impartial third party investigator, as the Sanders campaign demands.
The fact that its founder was the chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and that its current president and CEO was a veteran of Bill Clinton’s War Room and his Administration shouldn’t be the overriding factors in the Democratic Party’s total reliance on this company’s systems.
Technological excellence should be a much more important consideration than political control and the mutually reinforcing doling out of contracts to the benefit of a small elite circle of insiders.