May 16 – The Senate Releases Transcripts of the Infamous Trump Tower Meeting; As Technology Overruns Privacy, What Can Be Done to Restore the 4th Amendment?; The US Senate Votes to Reverse the FCC’s Overturning of Net Neutrality

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with today’s statement from the Republican Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the Russians did indeed help elect Trump, contradicting the widely-panned opposite conclusion of the House Intelligence Committee which Trump has celebrated, as well as the release today by the Senate Judiciary Committee of the transcripts of interviews with the participants in the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Trump’s inner circle and Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. A former senior State Department official, Max Bergmann, the Director of the Moscow Project and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, joins us to assess whether there are any more “smoking guns” in the over 2,000 pages of testimony released today, the most incriminating of which appears to be phone logs that indicate Donald Trump Jr. was communicating with a blocked phone likely his father’s, as though reporting in on the meeting before engaging in follow-up conversations with some of the participants. We will discuss the issue Trump constantly rails against, collusion, which has no legal relevance since the crime is conspiracy against the United States, and if meddling in our elections is at appears to be, a Russian intelligence operation, Putin would not have wanted or needed to collude with Trump to have achieved the results he got.

Part 2

Then we speak with Cyrus Farivar, the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica and author of the new book, just out “Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech” and discuss how as citizens we are under attack on two fronts from government and big tech companies who have us under more and more surveillance as technology has overrun privacy and the slow pace of legal reform is being eclipsed by the rapid transformation of technology. We assess what citizens can do to restore protections under the 4^th Amendment in the digital age in which the law desperately needs to catch up with Big Brother.

Part 3

Then finally we look into today’s surprising and encouraging vote in the U.S. Senate of 52 to 47 reversing the recent deeply unpopular ruling by the FCC to overturn net neutrality and speak with Craig Aaron the Managing Director at Free Press. We discuss how his organization and others are leading the grassroots effort to overcome the lobbying power of the big cable and telecomm companies who have the House of Representatives and President Trump in their pockets even though citizens and consumers hate these monopolies providing their cable and internet access as they continue to charge more for less service.