some of our great presidents were actually nominated in conventions composed of super delegates. nobody voted for these guys in

primaries. in fact, primaries were not important at all. they existed but they were not important. suppose, for instance, that our three returning presidents, roosevelt, dwight d. eisenhower, and john kennedy, found themselves in the middle of a campaign for a party's nomination. the object today would be the same as it had been in their days, to accumulate a majority of delegates at the party's nominating convention. there, however, the similarities would end. the strategy for winning the nomination today bears little resemblance to the strategy of days gone by because the system is so different. for instance, imagine roosevelt's confusion to hear people talking about momentum in february of the year of the convention. in roosevelt's day, momentum was

a term described -- that described behavior at the convention itself. imagine eisenhower's reaction to the news that senator howard baker had given up his job as majority leader of the senate as well as his senate seat, four years before the presidential election. in order to campaign full-time. and imagine how all of these men would react to a democratic primary race in which two senior democratic senators, joe biden and chris dunn, who between them had logged 70 years in the united states congress, were never seriously considered for their party's nomination because all the attention and energy were consumed by a former first lady and the first -- and a first-term african-american senator.

so, the point here is that the electoral college race is still very much the same as it has been throughout our history, but between 1968 and 1972, the democratic party was part and parcel of a huge reform system, a reform of the nomination system. the proximate cause of those reforms was the feeling on the part of antiwar democrats and women and minorities that the old system cut them out of the action. that the old system, famously categorized as old white men with cigars were simply not representative of the party and what the party was becoming. so, between 1968 and 1972, and then 1976, a whole series of

commissions were appointed in the democratic party, and i write about these in the book. and who the players were and what they were thinking about. and they fundmentally changed the nomination system from what it had been from about 1832, all the way to 1968. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at authors recently featured on "war words." barry lassiter, criminal justice prefer at city university of new york, discussed his research on violent crime in america. daily caller's senior contributor matt lewis explained that the run party must re-embrace conservative principles to remain relevant. and princeton university professor argued that america continues to suffer from racial inequality in the coming weeks

j.d. dionne will explain that the run's party adoption of goldwater withtive prims is drivel away moderate voters. michael hey depp will asks the decisions he made as a -- following september 11th. and coming up michael eric dyson will talk about how race impacted the obama administration and cory booker recounts his upbringing. >> my parents were relentless -- my father joking at me, an 18-year-old boy, high school a u-american football player, i had a -- my father would say, boy, development you dare walk around this house like you hate triple. you were born on third base itch worked hard in high school and my father would try to remind me of the blessings i enjoyed. anybody who calls themselves american we are better to be born in this country than a lot

of other places on the planet earth. we're reaping the harvest other other folks. so the next step in understanding that is this idea of taking responsibility. when you don't like somebody in the world, don't care if it's mass incarceration or the environmental contamination that -- suchness ft. there are many towns in the country that are facing challenges flint is facing, that is hurting our children right now. i always say you have a choice. you can accept things as they are or take responsibility for changing them. >> "after words" airs saturday at sunday and you can watch all programs on our business, booktv.org.

welcome. it's my pleasure to proabuse and have a conversation along with you with mr. edward lucas, talking about his book "cyberphobia." i think it has a great deal of interest and really in two different ways for this audience, and others. one is your own personal security of your computer, your information, your bank accounts, and all sorts of other things. second of all, also deals in the book is the national security issues involved. you can imagine or read about the cyber -- how cyber can affect the nation's defenses, utilities, security systems, and i think we have already seen many examples of that. mr. lucas, is a senior editor at the economist.

he has a long career as a correspondent in both russia and eastern europe. i should point out one book that i'm familiar with, published in 2008 called "the new cold war" and came out with a revision in 2013 and a third in 2014, which if you take a look it's you'll see that many of the things he said earlier are even more true than -- true now that were predicted back then. but tonight, the subject is cyber phobia, and just have mr. lucas talk about his book, then we'll engage you and the audience in questions you want to ask and we'll have a general discussion. we're good here until 6:00. so with that, mr. lucas. >> thanks very much indeed for having me here and to all the people involved in organizing this. i presented the new cold war in 2008, and it was a pretty

skeptical audience then. at a time when people thought that although we were having temporary difficulties in our relationship with russia and the difficulties became repugnant and i wished i had been proven wrong. no one would be happier than me. with went back to a good relationship with russia and our allies were safe and unthreatened. i hope this won't be too gloomy because my message is a gloomy one. be designed the internet putting convince -- putting convenience and low cost as priorities and we have didn't doing that for 20-30 years, and never really made security a priority, and the result ills that we have a huge amount of vulnerabilities bake bid the system. insecure software which people using. insecure hardware, we have

networks, we have -- which can be exploited by any number of the possible categories of -- we have spies, hostile governments, hostile military operations conducted over computers and networks. we have hooligans and the activists and the pranksters and then criminals, and although it makes sense to divide them into those categories when we are looking at them as threat actors, many of the tools they're using are really similar the vulnerability for social engineering that can be used by anyone. people did say to me when i first started writing this, why are you turning your attention from european security, which you claim to know little bit about even though many people think you're wrong and mad to internet security which you have record of, and actually as i started researching this, i became more and more aware of the parallels that we built off the european security order at

the end of the cold war basically with the -- that was based on an assumes of goodwill and trust, we all basically get on. we h we may have difficulties but we can resolve them, and this security order very few sanctions but a lot of cooperation and dialogue, will work for the indefinite future, and that's the way we set the internet up, assuming the beginning was going to be for academic purposes. we never thought about questions of identity and anonymity and we we never thought about ecommerce. i was against the rules to use the internet for commercial purposes back in the beginning. and if anyone said this will become the central nervous system of life and we'll use it for message, ecommerce, banking. all people said, hang on, it's not designed for that? are you sure you want to go down this flood but we went down it becaused work. i i was chief, con event,

flexible. and i think one of the first messages in my book is this is going to get worse and quite possible lay lot worse before it gets better. we have become habituated if i said opm will be hacked and 20 million files on government servants are going to be stolen. people would have first said, what's opm. or might have said, what's hacks but we have breaches happening all the time. it's difficult to get reports. my friends at the ft and other papers say, make -- just been hacked. 10 million customer details gone, maybe chinese, maybe criminals, we don't know. and the responsibility of the news organizations is same old same old as the breach last week. we have got use used to the idea

at that time breaches are normal but they're not end. tens of billions of dollars are flowing from our pockets into the criminal economy. very skeptical of the estimates made by cyber security companies because they have interest in talk the threat up. but people are talking about $500 billion a year. that's not just a loss to us. a large chunk is going into the pockets of some of the worst people on the planet, people who like to do us harm in other ways. so quite gloomy. we can get on to what to do in the kuo & a but -- the q & a and we have to start speaking english and germn or russian, other languages that people speak. most important feature of the book, maybe what makes it different, is that i've not used any computer jargon in it. the word cyber appears twice in the book. once on the cover and once in

the glossary where i say this is a word used to confusion rather than illuminate. when we talk about public health we don't talk about epidemiology or biology or detail houston the dna work in bacteria we have very simple messages, wash your hands, coughs and sneezes spread diseasessed, very simple messages which get cross complicated idea. road safety, you don't need to know the difference between a pin and a gasket to be a safe driver of a safe car. we're not there yet on the internet. fundmentalityly the solutions to the problem wed have are not primary technical. we kind of know what we need to do, and i get into that in the q & a, identity assurance, defense in debt, better network design. the tools are being secured are pretty much there. the problem is changing human behavior. it's the attackers are humans, we need to deter them and get

into the criminal economy and disrupt it, rates the cost of doing business weapon need to save people who don't at the moment feel they're hurting, actually are hurting, and people who don't feel they're scared, actually should be scared. more people are scared or hurting, then the change their behaviors, whether it's individuals, candidate, governments, or anything else. so stop there i look forward to robust questions, so if you have read the book and you think it's rubbish, tell me. if you haven't read the book and you still think it's rubbish you can eatable tack me for that. and if you want to ask about russia, that's okay, too. so we'll kick off with questions. >> if i could just have you pursue the issue you mentioned about some of the simple measures, and although a gloomy prognosis, is this -- are we in a period now where we'll talk about the wild west? i mean western united states in

the 19th century and not other wild wests. in other words, where they're sorting these thingsout and it will take several years, or as these things become uncovered, that based on where we were maybe five or ten years ago, we're moving in the right direction, either by governments or by personnel or are we really marking time and looking for a way ahead? >> i think it's worse than that. all vulnerability is increasing all the time. the criminal economy is get mortgage and more sew is in tick indicated. when i -- sophisticated when i was writing this book i was impressed you could sale malware on the dark web. there are three-to-customer support, basic help line which is how die make this work. second temperature help line, can you help me tweak so it it works in this way, and a tier for under the hood, can you help. so i think that both the threat at the surface, the number of things that are vulnerable to

attack, is increasing, particularly with the excess of things which we're tumbling into headlong, and the criminal economy is get fogger more sophisticated and could use your wild west analogy we don't have the sheriff, we don't have a posse and don't have visualization. we know -- i am not sure you can say this -- we know there are indians on the hill but we don't know who they're going to attack or how and what's going to happen. i'm not making a nasty point about native americans. just a general cultural reference. we have to start at the very basic level of making people feel this is not -- this is different from any real world analogy. a badly run computer may be no threat to you what be doing something very bad to somebody else. a million enslaved computers whose owners have no idea that

the attachment the clicked on or the link they opened is taking a little bet of the processing card and has made that computer into something that can then do a huge attack, not a web site off air could be used to spread more malware. lots of things you can do with a botnet. and this maybe cost me five cents a year in electricity. doesn't impede the function of my computer. why shy worry? well, our answer should be, it's as if you have multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or typhoid or something like that you can be a carrier of a disease that isn't hurting you but is endangering everybody you have contact with, and the most freedom loving states in america, if you have to communicable disease, they will lock you up and in your house and say you don't go out until your cured. so we have ways to think about it but haven't adopted that to computers. >> any country that is more

ahead than, say, the united states, for instance, when estonia had the massive hack several years ago, have the hey taken any measures that appear to be thwarting these measures. >> there are any see -- estonians in the audience. >> i'm a huge fan of they estonians, and there's three thing is think are really important here. one is that is d-does attack. a very crude kind of cyber attack. high-end stuff with you see in hollywood screenplay. a straightforward attack. it didn't knock them over. imimpedeed things, slowed things down, few web sites went down but they did not succeed in bridging estonian economy to a halt, didn't destroy their banking system, didn't do the things that the people who launched it thought it was going to do. since then estonia has a whole lot better in terms of defending itself against d-dos and looking at the critical infrastructure.

that's easy in a country of a million people, like a small u.s. state, but there's plenty of stuff there to look at. i think the most important thing about estonia, predates this attack, and that is they've got the fundamental business of identity assurance absolutely licked. that is with this thing, disis the esteen ya national i.d. card and your identity is in this chip, and u you don't share that dat with all the people you need to identify yourself. to you type in a pin code. the pin code clicks with the chip, and it sends a signal saying, yes, this is edward lucas. say i need to sign a document, put in a pin code and that is a legally binding signature in this country if you ask for

digital signature people print out a document, the sign it with a wet signature, then the make a pdf and e-mail it back. this is something i suppose to be secure. simply don't understand this in most countries, identity and access are hopelessly conflated. so if you want to rent a microphone system, sort of thing i'm talking on now, and you want to rent that good britain you hand over your address, your date of birth and a coach your driving license or passport. that is enough information to open a bank account. just to rent radio microphone system. this is crazy. we're handing out our immutable personal data. you will never guess another mother's maiden name. if you hand that stuff over and it's copied you're in sirrous dish syruppous -- you're in serious trouble. much better too have this crypto gric