Everyone here knows that the Koch Brothers have an intelligence shop that they set up in order to infiltrate and spy on liberal and progressive organizations. I can guarantee you that the GOP has a similar organization, and do other conservative groups.
And, a tried and true election year tactic is to place operatives into rival campaign organizations to gather intel on them, and to possibly disrupt them.
The absolute Holy Grail of of campaign spy-craft, is to steal or get access to a rival campaign's voter file. Bar none. That is the single most important tool any campaign has. It tells you who your voters are, what issues they care about, how many times and ways they’ve been contacted, and also all kinds of micro-targeting data.
If that data gets into the wrong hands, you are in deep shit.
We just learned that due to a 3rd party vendor error, the DNC’s voter lists for the Democrats running for President did not properly have a firewall between the data for each campaign. All three campaigns had access to the others lists.
Only one campaign, however, accessed a rival list. And that campaign was Bernie Sanders’.
Now, maybe it was just an overzealous Bernie campaign staffer/loyalist who was justifiably fired by the Sanders campaign. But, in some reports, 4 different user accounts accessed Hillary’s voter list, which implies that it may not have been just a single overzealous staffer.
Or, maybe it was a Koch brothers or GOP operative.
Now, one of 3 possible scenarios exists. The overzealous staffer, who just made a dumb mistake. The Koch or GOP operations penetrated the Sanders campaign and did it (which is ominous), or that this was a deliberate attempt by the Sanders campaign to cheat.
No matter which scenario it is, the Sanders campaign has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted with the crown jewels of Democatic voter list data. Until it can be, the DNC was 100% justified in suspending their access to it. There’s too much at stake to risk losing this election.
And, Bernie backers, if you want to get angry at someone, get angry at the person — or persons - who stole that data. Or get angry with the people who fucked up and mismanaged it. Don’t get angry at the DNC for doing what it’s supposed to do.