The Bernie Sanders campaign fired a staffer who accessed campaign data for rival Hillary Clinton, ABC News reports.
As a result of the breech, the Democratic National Committee suspended the Sanders campaign from having access to party voter data. This could seriously hamper the campaign's ability to target voters in the coming weeks ahead of the Democratic primaries.
According to ABC, it was the DNC's mistake that caused the data breach. As a result of a "software patch," data that was only supposed to be available to Clinton staffers was made available to "all users on the system across Democratic campaigns."
The information was only available for a short time, but Sanders staffer Josh Uretsky accessed the information. Uretsky claims that he and four subordinates "probed the system to discover the extent of their own data’s exposure."
“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,” said Uretsky to CNN. “We did not gain any material benefit.”
Nonetheless, the DNC has restricted the campaign from being able to access the data at all. Spokesman Luis Miranda said, “We want to get this resolved as quickly as possible.”
The Washington Post called upon the DNC to reverse its decision, saying, "(B)ased on what we know at this point about what happened, preventing the Sanders camp from accessing voter data for any meaningful length of time is not tenable."
The Post's Greg Sargent wrote, "Now the lead political story in the Democratic primary is that the Sanders camp is getting dealt a severe punishing blow by the DNC -- even though a lot remains unknown about what actually happened. This is no way to maintain confidence in the integrity of the primary process."
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