Josh Uretsky, the former Sanders campaign’s National Data Director, was interviewed by CNN this morning. This is what he had to say:
"We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening."
[…]
"To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit."
Uretsky is an experienced administrator of the NGP-VAN system that is used by the DNC. He said the campaign noticed the problem Wednesday morning.
"We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign's exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor… We did not gain any material benefit."
According to Uretsky, his team notified his superiors in the campaign and then were going to call the DNC, when they called him.
“They [the DNC] called me fairly quickly after the breach was closed to inform me that there was something weird going on and that portions of the system were shut down.”
Uretsky said he was deliberately testing the breach. He was going through the system to demonstrate to people who know the NBG-VAN system that something was wrong. He said he was testing the depth of the problem. Uretsky was:
"…going through stuff that I wasn't supposed to have access to."
[…]
"This wasn't the first time we identified a bad breach in the NGP-VAN system… "
"In retrospect, I got a little panicky because our data was totally exposed, too. We had to have an assessment, and understand of how broad the exposure was and I had to document it so that I could try to calm down and think about what actually happened so that I could figure out how to protect our stuff."
In my opinion, Uretsky was behaving in the way an administrator or QA tester would behave to find the extent of the problem. But, with the sensitive nature of campaign data and the highly volatile nature of this primary, using his “computer sense” wasn’t the right decision and he knows it.
"It was 100% my responsibly and I take full responsibility for whatever happened."
This misjudgment is why the Sanders campaign fired Uretsky.
In a statement by Michael Briggs, the campaign spokesman, and reported by the New York Times, he said:
“On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns…”
“Our campaign months ago 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.”
“Unfortunately, yesterday, the vendor once again dropped the firewall between the campaigns for some data…”
“After discussion with the D.N.C., it became clear that one of our staffers accessed some modeling data from another campaign. That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was immediately fired.”
What is ethical actions and good instincts in some cases, is a bad ethical decision and poor choice in others. This is the case of the latter.