The DNC Data Breach

In the world of politics, many strange things happen, but few rival the events among Democrats of the last day.  Here's what happened:  the Democrat National Committee has a computer data base of millions of voters that it makes available to its presidential candidates.  Each candidate, however, can add more information or append another data base to the DNC's.  The system housing these data bases is run by a computer firm hired by the DNC.  Over the last month, for some reason, the firewall that separates the DNC system from the candidates' individual databases was taken down.  No one has said how that happened, and no one seems to know why the computer security firm running the system let this happen.  While the firewall was down, the Sanders campaign people did a number of searches that called up data from the Clinton campaign data base.  Here too, no one knows if the Sanders people even understood that they were getting information that had been assembled by the Clinton campaign.  The lowered firewall was then discovered by the DNC.  It's unclear how that happened.  The Sanders campaign has said that it told the DNC of the problem, but that has not been confirmed.  When the Clinton campaign heard that its data base had been used by Sanders, the Clintonistas were furious.  As a result, in order to protect Hillary, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC suspended access by the Sanders' campaign to all of the data bases including the Sanders' campaign own data base.  The Clintonistas came out swinging and accused Sanders of criminal conduct.  The Sanders folks responded with a lawsuit in federal court to regain access to the data bases.  At that point, Debbie Wasserman Schultz folded.  That was a good move on her part since it was the DNC contractor who had created the entire problem.

This may all sound complicated.  Let me us an analogy to make it more comprehensible.  Think of it this way:  The DNC has a bowl of candy and it lets any candidate take whatever he or she wants from that bowl.  Each candidate has a separate bowl into which the candidate can put his or her own candy.  Somehow, the DNC arranged things so that any candidate could get access to the bowls of the other candidates.  When one candidate took some candy from another's bowl, the DNC penalized that person even though the fault was with the DNC.

Most likely, this issue will be discussed tonight during the Democrats' debate.  Now that is not enough to make me actually watch the debate.  I can only stand so much boredom and I have no desire to give up my Saturday night.  The truth is that this mess gives Sanders the opening he needs to come down hard on Clinton.  After all, the irony of Hillary accusing Sanders of criminal activity because of a computer data base is just too much to ignore.  Hillary seems to have committed all sorts of crimes in connection with her private unsecured email computer system.  Now she is complaining about something that is much, much less important.

I hope Sanders' goes on the attack.  At least that way, the people watching the debate will be able to stay awake.