July 31 - Is There a Majority of Reasonable, Rational, Educated and Decent People in America?; Does Putin Want Us, and in Particular Hillary Clinton, to Know He is Interfering in Our Election?; Could Russian Hackers Determine the Outcome of Our Election?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the latest insult by Donald Trump against a Gold Star mother who he implied did not speak when standing beside her husband who addressed the democratic convention, because she is a Muslim woman. In trying to determine whether there is a majority of reasonable, rational, educated and decent people in America who could prevent Trump from being elected president, we speak with one of the country’s leading sociologists, Doug McAdam a Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and author of “Deeply Divided: Social movements and Racial Politics in Post-War America”.

Part 2

Then, with Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Intelligence community blaming Russians for the hacking of the DNC and the DCCC we look into the possible motives that President Putin may have in so brazenly interfering in an American election. Ross Schulman, Senior Policy Counsel at The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute who previously worked for Google and the Center for Democracy and Technology, joins us to discuss whether, since Putin believes the U.S. has interfered in Russian elections and are behind the colored revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, that this is payback for the U.S. and he wants us, and in particular Hillary Clinton, to know that.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the broader possibility that since so many government and corporate systems are so easily and regularly hacked by foreign governments, it would be incredibly easy to hack into any number of election machines that different states have in the November election, most of which are incapable of verifying who voted and for whom. Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and a lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School whose latest book is “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World”, joins us to discuss his latest article at The Washington Post “By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines”.