Editor's Note: The following is an article from The Outsider, by Shawn Gaynor, that establishes connections between Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and a vulnerable database should raise the obvious question: Is this another "Dean Scream?" The Clintons have a long history of political dirty tricks.
   In 1992, when I was a platform spokesperson for Governor Jerry Brown's presidential campagin, Bill Clinton campaign operatives knowingly lied and claimed I forged signatures on a death penalty plank. They later apologized. Democratic Party insiders destroyed Howard Dean's presidential bid as an outside in 2004. The Clintons, as the consummate Democratic Party insiders, seem to be doing little more than illegally hijacking Bernie Sanders' campaign database. The irony, of course, is that this is coming from a candidate who was accused of far worse thing in the "Filegate" scandal and has recently had her own computer email problems. ~ Bob Fitrakis

By Shawn Gaynor
https://www.theoutsidernews.com/articles/2015/12/18/former-clinton-employee-owns-company-center-campaign-data-scandal
   When a lapse in computer security allowed at least one member of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign team to peek over the fence of a shared Democratic National Committee (DNC) voter database system and get a glimpse of confidential Clinton campaign data, a former top Hillary Clinton employee's software company was administering the database system.
   The data breach scandal, first reported by the Washington Post, has rocked the Sanders campaign just one day after the campaign was endorsed by the major labor union     Communications Workers of America and announced it had crossed the thresh hold of 2 million donors, a record setting pace that doubles Obama's 2008 contributors at the same point in the campaign.
   Both the DNC and the Sanders campaign have publicly blamed voter data giant NGP VAN for having created the data breach between presidential campaign rivals during a software patch installation to its voter engagement database.
   NGP VAN, the largest partisan election technology company, accepted responsibility, stating that for a brief period a firewall separating the campaigns in the system was jeopardized and during this time at least one Sanders staffer was able to view (though not download or save) confidential Clinton campaign data.
   The Sanders campaigner has since been fired. As a result of the incident, the DNC has taken away Sanders’ access to the data system that the committee licenses to NGP VAN.
   NGP VAN founder Nathaniel Pearlman has had a very close relationship with the Clintons, and served as chief technology officer for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.
   According to Pearlman's book “Margin of Victory,” when Pearlman handed over the day to day operation of then NGP to current CEO Stuart Trevelyan in 2007, it was due to Trevelyan's “political background and commitment that went back to Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign war room … and a sense of cool competitiveness that blended perfectly with the NGP vibe.”
   While working for Clinton, Pearlman managed controversial Clinton’s email server administrator Bryan Pagliano. In hearings about Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, Pagliano has refused to testify before the House Benghazi Committee, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
   Pearlman has stayed close to Clinton since her last presidential bid. Graphicacy, Pearlman's graphic design firm serves Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's think tank, The Center for American Progress.
   The potential conflicts of interest in providing rival campaigns with analytical tools and data analysis is mind boggling and the data breach at the center of the controversy appears to represent a fundamental design flaw in the NGP VAN voter database system.
   Rather than host competing campaigns' data on separate servers running a copy of the system’s voter information database, campaigns are hosted together and separated only by a software firewall on the same physical machine. Such an arrangement leaves the door open to data breaches that would be impossible with a system using separate secure servers.
   The Sanders campaign has reacted by saying it had privately complained to the DNC in the past about NGP VAN firewall problems.
   At a press conference discussing the data controversy, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver stated that NGP VAN had contacted the Sanders campaign over two months ago to report that the firewall between the campaigns was down, leading the Sanders campaign to inform to the DNC.
   “We are actually very confident at that time some of our data was lost to another campaign,” said Weaver.
   Nothing came of that glitch, and NGP VAN gave its assurances that no further breakdown of the data firewall would occur.
   When the failure of the firewall separating campaigns that was reported by the Washington Post occurred, the DNC blamed NGP VAN for the error, but the Party apparatus reacted to the data breach by indefinitely suspending Sanders’ access to its enormous voter database, locking Sanders out of what political experts say is a key tool for reaching voters.
   Weaver complained that by merit of having been locked out of NGP VAN's software by the DNC, it has been locked out from access to its own data collected during the race by Sanders’ campaign volunteers.
   “By their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign,” Weaver told the press. “Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign.”
   The Sanders campaign has threatened to sue the DNC in federal court to regain access to their campaign data.
   Sanders, a career political independent and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, is campaigning as a Democrat for the first time.