Welcome to the Politics Guys interview, conversations about American politics, economics, history, and culture with authors and researchers from across the ideological spectrum.

I'm Michael Barronowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is cybersecurity expert Sammy Sagey.

He's been deeply involved in the field for over three decades, working for organizations

including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Security Agency, and NASA, among

others.

He's published numerous papers, consulted national leaders on cybersecurity policy, and educated

the public through interviews with national media, including CNN, PBS, ABC, the New York Times, Financial Times,

The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine.

He's also the author of the recently published book,

Engineering Trustworthy Systems, Get Cybersecurity Design Right the First Time.

Sammy Sajery, welcome to this show.

Thank you very much. Nice to be here.

You know, with the 2018 midterm elections coming up very quickly, I think really the place to

start here would be to ask you about election system security. I currently, according to the stats

I've seen, around one of one in five

voters across the United States uses an electronic voting system that doesn't include a paper trail.

And so I'm wondering, how much of a security threat is this?

Well, I have a two-part answer. The electronic voting machines themselves are vulnerable to attack,

but generally you have to be close to the machine. You have to get your hands on the machine.

If an attacker can sort of access the machine, they can, they can hack it. But getting close in access like

that requires a lot of work and, you know, requires you to do that while, you know, that

...