October 29 - Top Spy Affirms the Need to Snoop on Foreign Leaders; "Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy"; Driving a Car as an Act of Political Protest

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with testimony by senior intelligence officials before a House panel on Tuesday where Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that learning the intentions of foreign leaders is a key goal of U.S. spying agencies, contradicting Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Diane Feinstein who called for an end to eavesdropping on leaders of countries allied with the U.S. Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice joins us to discuss the growing international outrage over the latest NSA revelations.

Part 2

Then, following profuse apologies in testimony from the government official in charge of the troubled healthcare.gov website, we will speak with the author of an article in National Affairs, “Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy”.  Steven Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, joins us to discuss the clumsy and inelegant patchwork of solutions known as kludges which are at the heart of the dysfunction between the government and private contractors in the context of a larger ideological battle over the size of government.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Dr. Ali Alyami, the founder and director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia about the Saudi women who are defying the repressive religious police and the feudal government by driving cars, an activity that is banned for fear it will encourage licentiousness and damage women’s ovaries. We discuss stirrings of protests for freedom and democracy in a tightly-controlled country under the absolute rule of a royal family determined to insulate their kingdom from the Arab Spring.