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The Current Transcript for October 13, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

It's spying on people, right? We live our lives online. Some of your most intimate conversations are happening maybe in the work day because you're multitasking.

MATT GALLOWAY: Working from home. Ever wonder whether the boss is tracking your every move online in 30 minutes? How a new law in Ontario will force some employers to tell employees how they're being watched when working remotely, and why some companies might be doing that snooping in the first place. Also this morning, the war in Ukraine is in its seventh month. How do Russians feel about this escalating conflict? Coming up, the view from Moscow on the historical roots behind Russia's support for Vladimir Putin's invasion. And later,

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Just as good as gallows helped to cement the drug war, Jay's Journal helped to unleash and certainly helped to accelerate what. We now call the satanic panic.

MG: It was a book sold in the seventies as the diary of a teenage girl lost to drugs. It turned out to be fake. Its impact very real. In an hour, how one author unleashed a moral panic that continues to this day. We begin, though, with a CBC investigation into the smuggling networks moving people from Canada into the United States. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Human smugglers cashing in on Canada's border to move people from Mexico to the U.S.

Guest: Jorge Barrera

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JORGE BARRERA: So where we're standing along Scribner Road and local residents have actually pointed us to a path that's been recently used and they told us that there's evidence that people have been through here, including clothes that have been left behind. So we're going to... We're going to go in and take a look.

MG: That's CBC investigative reporter Jorge Barrera, he's walking in the forest right on the border of New York State and Quebec. And the people he's talking about are migrants trying to enter the United States from Canada.

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JORGE BARRERA: Over here, we have a pair of blue jeans. We have socks. We have shoes that have been left behind here. So it's you know, it's possible that, you know, they took this stuff off because they got soaking wet and full of mud or they were told to take it off in order to get into a waiting vehicle. And I think Border Patrol is actually just parked outside there.

MG: Those patrol officers are also in the woods trying to catch the people who are trying to sneak across the border or. JorgeBarrera is with me now. Jorge, good morning.

JORGE BARRERA: Good morning.

MG: Where exactly were you in what we just heard.

JORGE BARRERA: Okay, well, this is an area along the Quebec, Vermont, New York State border that is a mix of heavy forest and farmlands that has seen a major increase in crossings over the past few months. And it actually has the highest rate of apprehensions of any region along the whole of the Canada-U.S. border. Just between March and August of this year, there were 600. And that's double the rate for the next highest region, which is along the B.C. Washington state border. And I was in specifically the New York state, Quebec portion of this area, which accounts for most of the apprehensions. And most of the people crossing through here are from Latin America and the vast majority from Mexico.

MG: Tell me more about that. What do we know about the people who are crossing the border from Canada into the United States?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, I spoke to five women who crossed and were apprehended, and they all spoke about fleeing violence, specifically against women, poverty and threats from the illegal drug world in Mexico. And one woman I talked I spoke to a 21 year is Isouri Martinez Alvarez, said that she didn't believe she could build a safe future for her daughter.

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I got pregnant when I was very young. I have a daughter that is one year old and I wasn't able to finish my studies. I decided to come because sadly in Mexico, there's no jobs to be found, especially not now. There's too much femicide, too much danger for women. And the salary is so minimal that it's not enough. Now that my daughter is growing, I will have more and more expenses. Mainly for her, I decided to come here.

JORGE BARRERA: So she was working at a food stand for 12 hours a day, six days a week, selling fruits and vegetables. And she only made 120 pezos a day, which is less than $8. She said it just wasn't enough to support her daughter.

MG: How did she end up here in Canada?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, it was through word of mouth and her family as she search for a way north in her home in Mexico that she heard about this route to America through Canada. Now, the father of her daughter had walked for ten days through desert to cross the US-Mexico line, and she said that he didn't want her to do that and she didn't think that she could make it. So Isouri was given a contact for a smuggler in Toronto, so she decided to fly to Canada.

MG: And at that point, what did she know about how she would get into the United States?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, she said the smuggler painted a very pretty picture for her, that it would be a safe and easy journey, just a three hour walk through a cornfield and near a city, and then she would be in America.

MG: And so what was it actually like?

JORGE BARRERA: She says it turned into a nightmare. After landing in Toronto in late May. Her journey to the border started on June 4th, and she actually paid $6,000 U.S. for this journey that her family helped her raise. They helped her raise this these funds. She would go over a succession of days and pull out the money from an ATM, drawing from Mexican bank account and and changing this into American dollars at a Scotiabank branch in Toronto. This was her family and hers life savings. Then the smuggler picked her up in Toronto, drove her to Montreal with three men who were also looking to cross, and all of them were in the same four by four pickup truck. They get to this parking lot in a hotel in Montreal. They're told We have to wait till dark. Leave all your backpacks behind. Turn off your phones. You can only carry your passport across. And then they were switching to another car and they were taken to the border.

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They took us on a highway where there was almost no cars. When we arrived, they told us we had to get off and run. So we got off and we ran. There was a ditch, but we didn't see it because it was dark. We kept running. And since the grass was very low. We had to lie down every time a car passed so that we wouldn't be seen. We got to a forest where we get lost twice. We had flashlights shining down on us and we would stand still. We found a highway and we had to cross it to get to another highway. That's where they would wait for us.

JORGE BARRERA: Know that flashlights that she she spoke about there, that was U.S. Border Patrol that was in the woods looking for her because they were caught on camera crossing the border and border patrol was on them. But there was a truck waiting to pick them up and they got in. But as soon as the truck pulled away, Border Patrol stopped them.

MG: And is that experience that she described, is that typical for what migrants are going through?

JORGE BARRERA: Yes, it was similar for each of the five women I spoke to. And also it was a similar experience in the records, the federal court records that we reviewed here. But each of the five women that we spoke to described a harrowing journey through dark forests, you know, through terrain that they're not familiar with and with their lives in the hands of smuggling guides who would leave them behind in an instance if they were going too slow or if they felt the heat get too intense. Now, one of the women that we spoke to, Rene Munoz Guerrero, she's 32 years old, and she came north to find a way to provide a safe life for her 11 year old daughter. She said there was too much violence against women in Mexico, you know, echoing what Missouri said. And she told us she actually tried to make a go of it in Toronto, but she just couldn't find proper work. She said she became desperate and her cousin offered to pay the smugglers price and she chose the journey across the border. Here's a little bit of her story.

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Horrible. Nothing like what they said. They said it was so easy that it is not dangerous. After running through a pasture where they drop us off from the truck was a forest. The guy left us there and told us that he was going back for more people. We will hear animals. They said they were bears. We waited a long time, about an hour or two, waiting for the others to arrive. It was not until they arrived that we began to walk. We started with it. Then Sleep Ranch area is not clean. We pass through swamps. Animals of all kinds could be heard. Then we started walking through an area where there was something that looked like searchlights. I don't know if they were cameras or what they were. From there, they told us that we couldn't turn to see the reflectors so that they will not shine on us. At times they told us to run. At times they had us going round and round because they didn't know the way. It was between swamps, branches. The road was hideous.

JORGE BARRERA: And her and her group were apprehended even before they were picked up on the other end.

MG: Help me understand why it is that people are choosing to go this route into the United States.

JORGE BARRERA: Well, I spoke to [unintelligible], an immigration lawyer based out of Albany, New York, and she deals with a lot of women who are caught crossing the border through this specific area. And she says the fact that Mexican nationals don't need a visa to get into Canada opens up another avenue for them to escape their country.

SOUNDCLIP

I mean, they're not really saying much, you know, but what I am hearing or what I am seeing is a lot of people from Mexico coming because there's a visa waiver programme with Canada obviously, and they can just go to Canada easily. It's very dangerous at the Mexican border. And also a lot of times under this old programme, instead of letting you enter the U.S., you can be deported back to Mexico while you await your case. So a lot of people, they heard about that, you know, and they decide it's easier for me to go to Canada, try to cross there. And I know Mexico's been getting more and more dangerous, more and more corrupt, more femicides. So that has sort of prompted people to the sort of political crisis in Mexico to leave when it's bad there, you know, and that's when people come.

JORGE BARRERA: In fact, Mexico is now Canada's top source country of asylum claimants, according to Canada Border Services Agency. It's recorded more than 7000 asylum claims from Mexico since January 1st. You know, that's compared to the second ranked country, which is Turkey, where there's 1400 claims.

MG: Who's actually involved in smuggling these people across the border.

JORGE BARRERA: From reading through over a hundred federal U.S. court cases and through interviews with law enforcement, that people who've been through this, these human smuggling networks span the Canada, U.S., Mexico borders. From interviews, we know that some of the people who pay these smugglers actually transfer money to bank accounts in Mexico, and that there's always communication from Canada with contacts in the U.S. to arrange pickup in travel once a group has been spirited through the border. In one case, we investigated the men sent to pick up Isouri Martinez Alvarez. We heard from her earlier in her group. He was under investigation by a multi-agency task force for alleged involvement in a drug organisation in New York City that actually imported fentanyl allegedly from Mexico. He is now in custody on drug and gun charges.

MG: And so how are they communicating with the people who want to make this trip into the United States?

JORGE BARRERA: So some of it is word of mouth. Some of it is actually through social media networks like Facebook and Telegram. And that's how I connected with one of these groups through a telegram channel called Mexicanos in Toronto. And I simply posted a message asking for help to get into the U.S. And then I received responses in my inbox from a man who later said his name was Jesuits, and we made arrangements to meet in a Toronto park so I could hand over a $500 U.S. deposit to secure my spot for a border run that weekend.

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[Foreign speech]

JORGE BARRERA: So I used a hidden camera and recorded her conversation. So in this part of the exchange, she's explaining how it will all work. He says a guide will go with me. Another indeed. On the day of the journey, I'd pay 3300 U.S. dollars. And once I'm in the car in the U.S., once I'm picked up, then I pay another 700. And that's on top of the 500 deposit that I gave him to secure the spot. So he's also telling me that this area, we're crossing through this cornfield to not leave any clues, no garbage, don't break off any stems because they want to keep using this point to keep bringing people over.

MG: And he believes that this is a way of safe passage. But as we heard, I mean, it's not safe at all. All the women that you spoke with were caught. How active is is law enforcement along that stretch of the border right now?

JORGE BARRERA: It's very, very active, particularly on the American side. I spent some time on a ride along with Chris Buskirk. He's the agent in charge at the Border Patrol detachment out of Champlain, New York. And he said they're actually really focussed on catching the guides and the people pulling the strings in the shadows.

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Those are the people that we are trying to apprehend and those are the ones that are very difficult because they know the area very well. They simply abandon these people and they head right back to Canada and they're oftentimes where the drivers of these vehicle, sometimes one of the new tactics is they'll want to receive a second payment before they'll allow these people to get in their vehicle. So you talk about exploiting people. That's what these organisations do and that's what we try to do. We try to disrupt, dismantle these organisations. And a lot of times we need the good interviews and we need the honest narrative from the people we apprehend to be the work our way up through these organisations, to dismantle them.

JORGE BARRERA: To get that type of information. They conduct interviews with everyone they catch and seise their cell phones and then they. File to obtain warrants to search these phones, which would have, you know, the WhatsApp conversations and the associated cell phone numbers of these WhatsApp accounts. And this would give them the contact points, the grid of this these smuggling networks. And sometimes they also hold those that they apprehend as witnesses against the smugglers who drop them off or pick them up.

MG: And how are they- I mean, we heard a little bit of this, but how are they actually catching people who are crossing the border at night?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, for years, you know, U.S. Border Patrol has had cameras, you know, studied across the border. So they usually catch, you know, these images of people crossing. And then these images are stream right to Border Patrol. And so Border Patrol has an idea of where people are crossing and then they launch these foot searches through the forest and fields to try to track people down.

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It was blocked by just in front of the tractor supply there for a while and then it turned around. Jorge, I've already chased that one out of here. I was trying to get to place and then. It absconded and it went over the bridge. It's a remote.

MG: So that's interesting. That vehicle's back, though. So he saw one of our market units got out of the area.

JORGE BARRERA: So what you're hearing here is that while these foot searches unfold, other agents are actually patrolling the roads in the vicinity of where they think they've crossed for vehicles with out-of-state plates, which they which these Border Patrol agents say are generally a tip off for the pick up vehicles. And that's what they're searching for. In this audio clip. Chris Buskirk The agent in charge.

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If you look at the terrain that we have in this area and the dense forest, that there's no technology that can penetrate through that foliage or are able to see through. So when a group comes south, they will sometimes take an established path. But if they veer off an established path and create their own, then we have to search in what we call a grid sense of a grid. And if we're not able to hone in where these people are, there's a multitude of areas they can get away. They just need to make it to hardtop, make sure they coordinate with the vehicle, picking them up. And then if we're not right there to make the apprehension, they're able to get away further into the US.

JORGE BARRERA: As you heard right there, they don't catch everyone. Sometimes people do slip through and that weakened that we were there. Bussey told us that at least four people were able to evade agents, even though they had their images from cameras and they disappeared into the fabric of America.

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Sir, can you come up?

MG: So who did they catch there?

JORGE BARRERA: This was a group of nine. Two women, seven men. They were spotted by cameras crossing the border. They crossed in from a golf course in Quebec, which has greens that rub up against the Canada-U.S. border. And they crossed through sort of the southeast corner of this golf course. And just before 6 a.m., Border Patrol actually keyed in on an SUV with Texas plates. And it actually led agents right to the group as they walked out of the brush into a rock. Worry about two kilometres from the border for the pickup. Now, their guide actually doubled back into Canada, back through the golf course. And we actually got there in the afternoon and witnessed two unmarked RCMP SUVs, you know, driving up and down the golf cart path, searching for the guys, but they never caught them.

MG: What about the women that we heard from earlier? What happened to them?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, with the help of, you know, immigration lawyer Palinkas Olczyk, Rene Munoz, Mel Guerrero, who was apprehended and released, was able to get to Kentucky to be with people from her home community in Veracruz and wait for her immigration process to conclude and ask for your Isouri Martinez Alvarez, she was held in a Clinton County jail in Plattsburgh for six weeks.

MG: Why so long? Six weeks?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, it's almost double the time that people usually spend in jail on a federal misdemeanour charge of crossing illegally. Usually they're sentenced to time served, which is about three weeks. But in this case, the assistant U.S. attorney wanted to hold Missouri as a material witness against the man who picked her up. So she was held longer because this man then got tangled up in the case in New York City and got arrested and put in custody for on the drug and gun charges. So he complicated the federal case.

MG: How did she eventually get out?

JORGE BARRERA: Well, you're Isouri's public defender argued they just couldn't, you know, keep her indefinitely behind bars on a misdemeanour charge. And eventually, the assistant U.S. attorney relented and she was released.

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[Foreign speech]

JORGE BARRERA: This is moments after your Isouri was released from jail and she managed to get a face time call with her mother and daughter. And she told me she didn't think she was ever going to get out. But now she's in California with the father of her daughter and is waiting the conclusion of her own immigration asylum process. She hopes one day her daughter will be able to join her there. And she says that her daughter has been her strength through all of this.

MG: Jorge, thank you very much for this. This is fascinating.

JORGE BARRERA: Thank you.

MG: Jorge Barrera is an investigative journalist with CBC News. The CBC News is next. And then,

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Anre you sure that this is the Putin thing? You said that this was his response to the Kerch Bridge attack. This is. Was his response to the bridge attack? Yes. Okay. The this is a right response?[/sc]

MG: Polling shows the vast majority of Russians continue to support Vladimir Putin's actions when it comes to Ukraine. In 15 minutes, what this support means for the ongoing war and Vladimir Putin's future. Plus, we'll hear how a new Ontario law might change the way employers keep an eye on their workers. Are you being spied on while you work remotely? Tell you more in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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Employers using technology to track productivity of remote workers; how Russians feel about the war in Ukraine

Guests: Lauren Reid, Denis Volkov

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, for decades, the cult classic Go Ask Alice has been read by teenagers and parents around the world. But the cautionary tale about drug use wasn't as honest as it appeared. Plus, the war in Ukraine continues, and we hear why the majority of people in Russia still seem to be supporting their leader. But first, is your boss tracking every move you make?

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Time Doctor will uncover how your team spend their time, get real time workday insights, even track website mappings. And what makes a Time Doctor really special is that it easily integrates with over 60 other applications, letting you track all activity from one centralised place.

MG: As an ad for one of many time tracking and productivity applications. That kind of software is how some companies are keeping tabs on their employees online activity. Some employers have been using this so-called boss swear without telling workers. In Ontario, though, that's going to change. A new law is forcing companies with more than 25 employees to disclose their electronic monitoring policy to staff. Lauren Reid is the president of the Privacy Pro. It's a Toronto based consulting firm. She's with me in studio. Lauren, good morning.

LAUREN REID: Good morning.

MG: So we just heard a little example of that. What sort of monitoring are we talking about? Broadly, what might be out there that's keeping an eye on employees?

LAUREN REID: I like to put it into three buckets. So you have a typical kind of monitoring that you would expect. You know, if you have a fleet of trucks, you have GPS in the truck to know where it's at. If you have a store, you have security cameras in the store to monitor for safety or security or loss prevention. And so those are the typical things. No one's really surprised by those. And in a lot of cases, the employee was aware of them before. You have another bucket where monitoring is kind of a side effect. In that case, you know, you call into a call centre and it says the call will be recorded for quality and training purposes while that's recording you, but it's recording the employees as well. Again, usually the employees know about it and the one that you just mentioned falls into that third bucket, which is very intrusive surveillance in many cases. And that's where you're monitoring people sometimes in the background. In some cases, people are aware of it, but they usually have no control over it. We saw a lot more of it in the pandemic as people shifted to working from home and people bosses, this boss was being installed so that employers can keep track of what you're doing when you're doing it, whether you're, you know, quote, wasting company time and whether you're being productive.

MG: How are they doing that? I mean it. We'll talk about the way that it's being framed, but how are they monitoring my time in a ways that I wouldn't know.

LAUREN REID: Let me start with some of the worst ones, right? The most offensive ones. Sometimes it's actually going and it's behind the scenes. Somebody, a human, can go and look basically at what you're looking at on your screen. One of the products brags about it's like watching a YouTube video, but you're watching what somebody is doing on their screen. In some cases, it's reading your DMS. It's looking at what you're posting on social media because it's connected to your social media accounts. Keystroke logging. Sometimes it's tracking whether your mouse is moving.

MG: Keystroke logging is like how much I'm typing on keys.

LAUREN REID: Typing, yeah.

MG: And what I'm typing.

LAUREN REID: What you're typing. And sometimes they're using technology to kind of listen for certain words or certain phrases to try to detect and draw conclusions about what you're talking about, typing about.

MG: And mouse activity, just in terms of like whether the computer mouse is like moving around, is jiggling around or whether I'm actually doing something or if it's just sitting there, clearly I'm not doing anything.

LAUREN REID: That's what they're assuming. That's the conclusion they're drawing. If your mouse is not actually moving.

MG: I want to get to this legislation, but you use some words to describe kind of what's going on. You said it's intrusive. I think you said it was offensive as well. Why? Why that language to describe the use of that technology?

LAUREN REID: I mean, it's spying on people, right? We live our lives online. Some of your most intimate conversations are happening maybe in the work day because you're multitasking. One of the technologies, the demo that they were promoting was showing like, hey, you can see when someone's on Facebook. You can see when some body is on Gmail and they're not stopping you from going on Facebook. They're letting you go on Facebook and then reading what you're posting. And it's not just what you're posting publicly, it's what you might be writing back and forth to people, and it's recording it as well. It's not just when they're looking at it in real time.

MG: And so what are companies in Ontario now going to have to disclose to their employees when it comes to the use of this software?

LAUREN REID: Well, they have to tell them what they're doing when they're doing it, if it's a constant always-on type of thing or if it's something that they're only doing in the case of an investigation or an incident. They have to tell people where they can ask more questions. Basically, it's just about transparency about what they're doing. This law does not prevent them from doing anything or give them any guidance on what they're supposed to do or stop doing.

MG: So practically, what differences are going to make? I mean, again, legislation that says, we have to tell you this is one thing, but for employees, which is actually going to mean.

LAUREN REID: Regulation is one source that I think people tend to over rely on or assume too much that regulation or even if we had privacy regulation in Ontario, that that would protect you. It doesn't. And by design, it's not meant to be prescriptive to say, you must do this, you can do that. It leaves some leeway to make judgement calls because like I said, sometimes monitoring is good and it makes sense and. Sometimes it's not proportionate to what you're trying to achieve. So by being transparent, I personally believe that's the most important step because now employees, they know what's going on and they can make informed decisions when people are powerless. They will find a way, right? Not everyone has the luxury of quitting. Often these technologies are disproportionately impacting people who are in lower paying jobs. People who are pregnant women take on most of the childcare responsibilities. Imagine you step away to deal with a kid because you're working at home and your mouse isn't moving. Exactly. And they're actually quantifying that and saying, you know, you wasted this amount of time. And so once employees are aware of this, they can seek help in other ways. Now, this one comes through Employment Standards Act. In Ontario, we don't have privacy legislation that applies to provincially regulated companies. But what we will find is that people will seek redress on tik-tok with CBC. Right. People will get this out there. We've seen Gen-Z has a very low tolerance for abuse of power in their employers. Right. You hear of quiet quitting? I am inspired by the way that they think about work and they think about their time as an employer. I respect it. And so I think that employees, while regulation, might not protect them, this empowers them.

MG: How does this compare to legislation that would exist elsewhere? Is there anything that is similar that perhaps was drawn upon or that we could draw on in future to make the protections that you're talking about more robust?

LAUREN REID: Well, if we were in B.C., we would have privacy legislation protecting us. It would set a standard that the monitoring has to be reasonable, that they have to have exhausted less privacy, invasive options. They would have a regulator that they would be able to contact and file a complaint and the regulator would be able to do something about it. That would be the case if we were in Alberta or Quebec as well. It would somewhat be the case if we were a federally regulated company, like a bank or a telco. But here in Ontario, we don't have that protection under privacy law. And this one actually came through the Employment Standards Act. So it has an impact on people's privacy rights. But it wasn't a privacy law.

MG: I just wonder where this leaves employees. I mean, you said that it gives them options. What are the options that the employees have if they know that software like this has been deployed.

LAUREN REID: Speaking up and speaking out. And I think that's more powerful sometimes than people realise. Also, I want to say that all of the employers that I've worked with, when they start to understand the impact of this, they stop doing it right. Just the act of having to be transparent about it and think through the harms. It changes behaviour on the employer's part too. I mean, you're talking with an employer and you're saying, okay, if you want to keep doing this thing then you have to be transparent about it. And they say, well, if we were transparent about it, then people would be offended by it. And it's pretty clear even to a little kid, maybe if what you're doing would be offensive, then you shouldn't do it anymore. But most employers are not doing this on purpose. I mentioned that sometimes this is a side effect and sometimes it was done with good intentions. Right. It was the pandemic. People were working from home. People lost control. The ability to go look over someone's shoulder. I don't believe that people did this with bad intent. I don't believe that companies were just, you know, let's encroach on people's rights. I think that these were things done with good intent that had unintended consequences.

MG: Do you understand why employers in this speaks to that intent, why employers might say that something like this is necessary? You're not in the office anymore. You're on software. I'm certainly not speaking on behalf of the boss. I'm an employee myself. But you can imagine that some employers would say, you're using our equipment, we're paying you for 8 hours. Yeah. I want to know if you're on Facebook. Yes, I want to know if you are not working at the time. When we say you're working and it's more difficult for us to monitor that when you're not in the office then than when you are in the office. Do you do you understand where they might be coming from in that?

LAUREN REID: Absolutely. Those are such valid objectives. They're important to doing business and being successful in business. If you don't want people on Facebook, it's really easy to block them from accessing Facebook. If you really want people to be productive, it's probably a lot easier to measure their outputs than the amount of time that their mouse is moving. And so I think those objectives can be achieved through ways that are not spying on employees, on what they do, on their personal time.

MG: Some of the suppliers of this technology also say that it allows for the third party source of truth, that if you have a dispute between the employer and the employee, well, let's go to the tape and see what the tape shows. And the tape says that you were working or you weren't working. Is there any benefit to that?

LAUREN REID: So I'm not an employment lawyer, but I work with one. And she was explaining that a lot of times when this was. Acted in this secretive way, it can't even be used as evidence. And so employers can face issues around litigation and not even be able to either from the employees if they are thinking that this is an unfair termination. And then this evidence can't be used in other types of investigations because it wasn't obtained in a way that was fair. So sometimes you're doing all of this monitoring and it doesn't actually achieve the objective you wanted it to, which is to kind of have something where the employer is looking to protect themselves.

MG: The nature of work, as you say, has changed. And so for employees, what should they be thinking about not just with this legislation, but in the context of everything we've been discussing?

LAUREN REID: I think employees should think about the values of the companies that they work for. They should hold their employers accountable. A lot of employees are also bosses. A lot of employees are managers. And I think that employees should have a say. They should feel empowered. They should be asking where these policies are. Employers with over 25 employees had to publish them. And so I think that employees should be asking questions and also keeping an open mind. Sometimes there is a reason for the monitoring. When it's transparent, you can adjust your activities accordingly. But at least now you know that someone's monitoring.

MG: You're also a boss.

LAUREN REID: I'm a boss.

MG: And so what is your message to other employers?

LAUREN REID: Treat people like humans. Look at outcomes, not necessarily just inputs. If people are accomplishing what they're supposed to be accomplishing, give them some flexibility. As you said, the nature of work has changed. I think that the power balance between bosses and employees in the time of the great resignation and the shift to more remote work has changed. And we have to be modern about it. We have to, you know, think of employees as people and not resources or assets.

MG: Lauren, thank you very much.

LAUREN REID: Thank you so much.

MG: Lauren Reid is the president of the Privacy Pro. It's a Toronto based consulting firm, Employees, Employers. We'd love to hear from you. Your thoughts on Boss Square. Email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca.

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MG: You're listening to The Current. My name is Matt Galloway. It's been over seven months since the start of the war in Ukraine. This week, Vladimir Putin once again is targeting civilian sites. The moves have been met with condemnation from around the world on Russian state TV, though, the response has been different.

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[Foreign speech]

MG: This commentator is saying it can't be a one off. It needs to be constant for two to five weeks in order to disable all their infrastructure entirely, then Ukraine will descend into cold and darkness. Amid this escalation in force and in rhetoric, recent polling shows the majority of Russians at home still support the war. Denise Volkov is the director of the Levada Centre in Moscow. It's an independent organisation monitoring public opinion in Russia. He co-authored a recent study with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace looking at how Russians feel about this war. Denis Volkov Hello.

DENIS VOLKOV: Hello.

MG: How would you characterise support for the war amongst Russians right now?

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, first of all, The majority of Russians see it as a conflict, not exactly with Ukraine, but with the West, about Ukraine. And we saw that from the very beginning. It was understood in this way and the blame was put on the United States that it is the United States where this was escalating and started this conflict. And in these circumstances, we saw that the public opinion was consolidated behind the Russian leadership. We saw this so-called rally behind the flag effect. And then for almost six months, it was pretty stable and Only with the start of partial mobilisation, at the end of September, we saw that some people started to change their opinions, but still, yes, we have a rather high support.

MG: When you say some people, I mean, is there a way to to quantify that in terms of how much support has dropped now that people are being called up and sent to the front lines?

DENIS VOLKOV: Yes, we saw a drop in about six or seven percentage points speaking of approval of Putin and the government and prime minister. So we saw all these institutions dropped in public opinion polls.

MG: Russia is a huge country and so is that spread out equally or if you move outside of, for example, Moscow? Does this support change at all?

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, the major changes that we see, it is between biggest cities which are more sceptical or less supportive, and rural areas which are more supportive also between Internet users who get news from the Internet, from different different sources, free sources, and those who get their news from state television, which is again, mainly people outside of big cities, older generation, and the younger, younger generation that are also more sceptical, less supportive. But we saw these cleavages in almost any our poll on political issues during the last three or four years. And we see it now.

MG: Is your sense I mean, this is still a partial mobilisation that if a full draught were to be put into place, if if that were to expand that, that would change that level of support and increase the number of people who would be opposing the war.

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, yes, I think this is a rather unpopular decision, because for six months, the majority of Russians started to think that this conflict will not affect them directly. We saw that it was more and more perceived as a distant war, and a partial mobilisation changed that perception. And we saw a considerable level of anxiety in Russian population. It's almost, I think, three, three quarters who feel anxious, who feel vulnerable about themselves, about their relatives, sons, husbands. But still, I would say the predominant attitude towards this is that it's our duty to go and serve. Though, of course, we saw quite considerable number of young people leaving the country, but again, there were younger, younger, well-off people from bigger cities.

MG: Use that phrase, rally around the flag. And that speaks to what you were just talking about in terms of people feeling that it was their duty to to serve. How much support is there for the war compared to support for the leadership of Russia and for Vladimir Putin?

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, it is about how the support is about 75%, but it is not solid. We saw that it's about 45 who have unequivocal support, who don't think of any of it, do not have any qualms about it. And about 30% who joined the majority and saying that, well, yes, there are problems. It's bad that the people are dying, but what else would have been done? And the majority have the attitude, the following attitude, that we are small, ordinary people. We do not understand politics. Let the government decide. If the government decided to to go to a war. So let it be this way.

MG: What is the role of the media in this? Again, you've hinted that this already, but in terms of what people actually know about the war, how is that shaping their support for the war?

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, there is certain differences between those who follow the news through state television and then between those who are following through the Internet. But I think it's even more important, not the the exact news and the current events, but the important it is important that these audiences were formed long ago and during world decades, especially for the older generations. For decades they were following the news through the state media and have the certain understanding of not only this conflict, but other conflicts that Russia was participating in back in 2014 with Ukraine in 2008, with Georgia. All of it was understood as conflicts between Russia and the West and Russia and the United States, and not with those countries where actually military actions was taking place. So I think this longer usage of certain certain sources of information or from this patterns of understanding what is actually happening. Now.

MG: Tell me more about that and that the the importance of understanding that historical context. You've said this a couple of times that many Russians see this not as a war with Ukraine, but a conflict with the West. How has Russia's place in the world helped shape the support for this war?

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, I think we should go back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, when first there was big hope for a better relationship with the West, especially with the United States. People were thinking we will be friends, allies and so on. It didn't happen. People became disillusioned by middle of the nineties. And then we saw how distrust, distrust towards the West started to grow. Then there were an enlargement of Nato, then they were a series of international conflicts. And then I think at some point Russian leadership also realized that it is a good instrument to boost their popularity. Though again their overall attitude towards the West and this distrust towards the West was formed even before Putin came to power. And then the authorities ... I think, used it to consolidate public opinion behind the leadership, as opposed to the adversary from the West.

MG: Just finally, why do you think it's important that we understand this? This war is in its seventh month now, and it shows no signs of ending. Why? Why do we need to understand that big picture and that long tale of history?

DENIS VOLKOV: Well, I think it is important to understand that, because, first of all, we must make informed decisions and also because this long history makes it very hard for public opinion to to change, because it's inherited understanding ... rooted, very deeply in the people's understanding what is happening. Very hard to have an alternative view when you have this long history.

MG: This is fascinating, and I'm really glad to talk to you about it. Denise Walker, thank you very much.

DENIS VOLKOV: You're w elcome.

MG: Take care. Good bye.

DENIS VOLKOV: Bye bye.

MG: Denis Volkov is director of the Levada Centre. It's an independent public opinion polling group in Russia. He was in Moscow. Coming up after your regional update, it's been read by generations of teenagers the story of a young girl's deadly spiral into drug use. In reality, though, Go Ask Alice is more propaganda than personal memoir. How this book and others like it helped fuel political agendas for decades. That's coming up in 90 seconds. My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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Rick Emerson on the propaganda of Go Ask Alice

Guest: Rick Emerson

MG: Hello again, I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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In the fall of her last year in high school, our daughter died of an overdose of drugs. We were never able to find out what the drugs were or whether or not they were self-administered. Since she stopped keeping a diary several months before, we had no clues as to why she died. We have discovered since then that she was one of almost 5000 drug deaths that year. And so we decided to make her diary public because we feel she would have wanted us to.

[Music]

MG: But that was the sad and scary ending to the 1973 made for TV movie. Go ask Alice. It was based on a book that was already on its way to becoming a cult classic. The diary, with its graphic depiction of drug use, sex and teenage angst, spoke to a generation of young people struggling with their own fears. That certainly played under the fears of parents as well. There is another story, though, behind Go ask Alice. And Rick Emerson tells it in his new book, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries. Rick, good morning.

RICK EMERSON: Morning, Matt.

MG: Just give us the brief kind of thumbnail sketch about what that book, go ask Alice was actually all about it.

RICK EMERSON: So Go Ask Alice was a book that came out in September of 1971, and it is ostensibly the anonymous posthumous diary of a teenage drug addict, a girl who runs away from home. She gets lured into drugs by friends. She runs away from home. She relapses, gets clean, relapses gets clean, and eventually dies at 17 and leaves behind this diary, which is then edited and published in 1971 as Go Ask Alice. And it really made a giant impact on the culture, and it helped to cement a lot of attitudes about drugs, especially amongst older people. And it really Glasgow was really in addition to being a bestseller, really helped to create the modern young adult genre.

MG: What was the context that it was published in? I mean, what was America like when this book appeared in 1971?

RICK EMERSON: You know, the country was very much riven. And one of the big issues, one of the big problems that was concerning America, you know, was drug use. And the fact that we had come out of the sixties where there had been obviously so much social upheaval, you know, we're in the you know, the the presidency of Richard Nixon, a very polarising, very divisive president. Vietnam is raging. So there's all of these things that are bubbling underneath the surface in terms of society. And one of the things that the White House focuses on as either a you know, as either a health concern or a political distraction, depending on your level of cynicism, is LSD. And in 1970, more people, more Americans than ever before had tried LSD for the first time. It was something like 800,000 people trying it for the first time. And that number was actually set to increase in in 1971. And by all accounts, it did. There had also been a lot of attention paid to what was kind of turned the runaway crisis. In other words, the idea that more and more kids every year, more and more teenagers were running away from home. And this was coming again on the heels of the sixties and all of this social upheaval. And it was very much a sense of these things might be linked. Something is causing all of this. These teenagers who once seemed so obedient and so respectful and so good and so wholesome, are now increasingly alienated or, you know, or difficult or contrary or simply vanishing. And go ask Alice in one fell swoop. And it offered a handy explanation as to why that was happening.

MG: When the book was published? What sort of reviews did it get?

RICK EMERSON: To begin with, when it came out, it was almost universally treated. I mean, certainly in the mainstream press, I would say for the first decade, probably 90% of the coverage treated it as an authentic diary, as being genuine. And the larger split really seemed to be over the nature of the content, because Go Ask Alice was is a very graphic and very aggressive book and very profane in some ways. And there was one school of thought that said, well, this is a graphic and grim, but potentially life saving book that teens and parents should read maybe together. And there was another school of thought that said, wow, this book is just reprehensible. And it's, you know, and it's just filth and smut and it's damaging to kids. And that almost instantly made it one of the most banned and challenged books of the late 20th century.

MG: How many copies has it sold since it was first published?

RICK EMERSON: It sold more than five million so far, now close to six. There was a time actually in the early seventies when it was selling so quickly they couldn't keep up. It was actually outstripping the publisher's ability to create new copies, ended up being translated into 16 languages and was turned into an Emmy Award nominated TV film and really just just made a gigantic impact on the world and still selling well today.

MG: It's still in print now.

RICK EMERSON: It is still in print. 50th Anniversary Edition just came out at the beginning of 2021. And, you know, if you - I'm not on, I don't really use Tik-Tok because I'm officially ancient. But I do know that even now, today, I mean, it has continued currency amongst readers and amongst young readers, and yet it's still selling well 50 years after the fact.

MG: This was, as I said, sold as a real diary. Was Alice a real person?

RICK EMERSON: Well, that's the question that everybody's had for 50 years, for the first, you know, ten years or so, as I mentioned, I would say that most of the coverage treated it as being absolutely authentic. And by the time you get into the 2000s, that had really shifted to, you know, 50/50 or 60/40 with a lot of people thinking, well, I was never existed. This book is a whole cloth fabrication. And without spoiling the story too much, because it is just an unbelievable, you know, saga, I'll say that there is an answer to that question. And by the end of the book, I uncover, you know, the broad strokes of what really happened. And while it caught me off guard, it, you know, the real story, once you learn it, does make does make perfect sense.

MG: Well, was there any fact checking that was done by publishers. And when the book comes into their hands and we'll talk about how it did in a moment, but was there any fact checking that was done to verify that this was actually a real diary before it went out?

RICK EMERSON: No, I interviewed Catherine Fitzgerald, who was the- she was the actual in-house editor for Ghost Galleys, Apprentice Whole. And for all intents and purposes, they took it at face value.

MG: What was the story behind the diary getting into the hands of the woman who brought it to that publisher.

RICK EMERSON: The details seem to change every time the story got told, but the basic version is this is in 1970, a woman named Beatrice Sparks was working at a Christian summer camp, and she met a girl that everybody eventually called Alice, who was from California and had dealt with some drug issues and, you know, some personal tumult. And that they made a connexion and they stayed in contact. You know, they were corresponding after this summer camp ended and that later, when Alice died, her diaries ended up in the hands of Theodore Sparks, who decided to publish them as a way to to help other troubled teens.

MG: And who is she? Who is Beatrice Sparks?

RICK EMERSON: Beatrice Sparks is the woman behind Go ask Alice and several other anonymous teenage diaries. She was a deeply conservative Mormon and a mother of four, and by her account, she discovered and edited the Go Ask Alice and then subsequent diaries, all of which supposedly came from from real teenagers.

MG: The book that you've published is LSD, Satanic Panic and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries. Why do you use that word, imposter?

RICK EMERSON: Because, as becomes grimly clear later in the story goes Scandalous was not an isolated incident. If it had only been, Go Ask Alice. You know, we'd probably still be talking today, but the story would be a lot different. There were other books that followed, and one of those books was Jay's Journal and Journal I sometimes call a sibling book to Go Ask Alice. It was a similar story, but about a teenage boy and just as good as gold was helped to cement the drug war and helped to really to fuel a lot of the misconceptions about about drugs and addiction journal helped to unleash and certainly helped to accelerate what we now call the Satanic Panic, which was this 15 year kind of literal witch hunt. And, you know, and a part of that was a distortion of a real life diary, a distortion that the Beatrice Sparks, you know, committed.

MG: What was Jay's Journal about? I mean, again, the Go Ask Alice is about LSD and what happens when you get on this drug and she, you know, her life falls off the rails tragically. What was Jay's Journal of it?

RICK EMERSON: Jay's Journal, the reason I call it a sibling book is it follows a very similar arc. Jay's journal is about a teenage boy, a young man who is pulled into black magic, into witchcraft and eventually ends up taking his own life at the age of 16. And as with Go Ask Alice, the backstory that was given is that his diaries were then edited and then presented to the public, published as this book, as a way to help teenagers, a way to help other, other troubled young people.

MG: And what had happened with him.

RICK EMERSON: In well, according to Jay's journal, as the book was presented, he had been lured first into drug use and then into the occult. And in reality, you know, the story was a lot more complicated. There was a real life teenager at the centre of Jay's Journal. And, you know, his story is a lot more interesting and a lot more complex, but lacks the occult elements that defined Jay's journal.

MG: His name was Alden Barrett.

RICK EMERSON: Alden Barrett. Alden Barrett was a teenager in Pleasant Grove, Utah, who died in 1971. He had struggled with depression, struggled with drug abuse and and sobriety, and eventually ended up taking his life and he'd left behind a diary. And a few years later, his mother reached out to Utah Sparks, who by then had publicly identified herself as the, quote, editor of Go Ask Alice. And Alden's mother said, Well, perhaps you can do for my son's diary what you did for Alice's diary. And that's the book that then ended up becoming Jay's Journal.

MG: As you mentioned, this in part is the catalyst for what has become known as the Satanic Panic. It spread through the United States, through Canada as well. What was the Satanic Panic?

RICK EMERSON: The Satanic Panic was it seems strange to talk about this, you know, even having lived through it and knowing that it happened. But it was this literal witch hunt that spread through the United States and throughout North America and actually a lot of the world where, you know, it's a thing that we're unfortunately seeing a lot of echoes now where normal, rational, intelligent people suddenly became convinced that there were, you know, these platoons, these underground covens of Satanists lurking everywhere, lurking behind everything, and that they were. And just as in the early seventies, you know, we're told that around every corner was somebody who was waiting to Dozier Soto with LSD during the Satanic panic was the idea that, you know, there were Satanists hidden everywhere, hidden in plain sight, ready to lure your children into black magic or, you know, to to lure your kids to some sort of occult related suicide or possibly running, you know, your child's pre-school. And it really destroyed lives. You know, I mean, for a good 10 to 15 year stretch, it shattered lives and in some cases, whole communities just with sort of roulette abandon and ended up with a lot of prosecutions, a lot of convictions and a lot of people spending a lot of time in prison for things that not only didn't happen, but things that couldn't have happened.

MG: When you say destroyed lives, I mean, tell me more about that. What happened? I remember growing up through this and I mean, people said, you know, don't be playing Dungeons and Dragons. That's your gateway into hell. And the satanic panic. There were a lot of other you have a list of signs your children is into devil worship, heavy metal, black clothing, Stephen King smoking clove cigarettes. That can all seem a bit far fetched and amusing from a distance. But when you say people's lives were destroyed, what do you mean?

RICK EMERSON: Well, so, for example, in the in the town of Wenatchee, Washington, which is a town of I mean, I think at the time it had something like a population of 25,000 people. There was this prosecution that happened where the town they ended up filing, I believe. And this is not this is not a mistake. This is the actual figure. They ended up filing something like 29,000 counts of essentially ritual satanic abuse against a few dozen adults, most of whom were, you know, disadvantaged, a lot of them, some of whom were actually illiterate and could barely understand the charges that were being filed against them. But, you know, these four these were absolutely unfounded, unbelievable accusations of abuse. And there were people who ended up serving time for this. You know, there are cases all across the country in West Memphis, Arkansas. There was a trio of young men who eventually just became called the West Memphis Three who were sentenced to prison, one of them to death row for committing a triple murder, ostensibly as part of a satanic ritual. And there was no evidence against them. None. Zero. And they were eventually given their sentences were de facto overturned, but not before they'd spent two decades in prison. One of them had, you know, been facing execution and presented at evidence as evidence at their trial was, as you mentioned, the fact that they listened to heavy metal, the fact that they read Stephen King, the fact that they wore black clothing. And this happened not that long ago.

MG: And what role did Jay's journal this diary in quotation marks? What role did it play?

RICK EMERSON: Jay's Journal In addition to furthering the idea that there were Satanism, you know, lurking everywhere, waiting to lure your children into this underground world of black magic, it helped to create the idea of occult related teenage suicide. In other words, the idea that if you were going to, you know, the teenagers, especially young men, were killing themselves because they were lured into black magic. That is an idea that effectively didn't exist before journal. But after Jay's journal, it was everywhere. And there were, you know, to look to hard to find a lot of examples, probably more than we ever know, of teenage suicides being explained away as having been caused by effectively being caused by the devil. And that's an idea that comes almost whole cloth out of this book, Jay's Journal and you know, as a result. All of these, you know, the real issues that cause kids to kill themselves were minimised or just sort of disregarded. Just as in the early 1970s, there was this upsurge in drug use and teenage runaways. That was to some degree explained away by Go Ask Alice. There have been a massive uptick in teenage suicide, which unfortunately is happening again right now. And rather than explaining the real complicated issues underpinning that, it was a lot easier just to say, well, he did it because of the devil. And Jay's Journal played a played a massive part in that. It also had a real personal toll for the Barrett family in Utah because it was a distorted version of their son's actual diary.

MG: What did the publication of this book and the chaos that followed mean for that family?

RICK EMERSON: It's a fascinating and really heartbreaking story because, again, all Tom Barrett is a real life teenager who leaves behind this diary. And a few dozen of his diary entries show up in the Book Journal. But they're surrounded by a whole lot of things that are just fabricated and things that depict him unfairly and inaccurately as being this violent teenage Satanist, essentially in a cult psychopath. And what was worst of all is that a lot of the personal details were left intact. They were left unchanged. And so in this small community that was incredibly religious, it's still more than 90% Mormon at the time, I think it was 98% Mormon. Everybody knew everybody. It was a very insular culture. And this book comes out and it didn't take people in that community long to figure out that, Oh, Jay is really Alden Barrett. Oh, and hey, apparently he was a teenage Satanist. And because his real diary entries are mixed in with a lot of this fabricated occult nonsense. People conflated those things. And so the Barretts, who had already lost their son to suicide, effectively lost him again in public because his memory, his reputation, all of that was you know, it was just destroyed and blackened by this book.

MG: What was the situation here in Canada with Che's diary? Because there was some involvement with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties in this as well.

RICK EMERSON: Yeah. So amongst the stories peddled by this book, Jace Journal is the idea that cattle mutilations, which of course, you know, there's we've heard all kinds of explanations for those sorts of things over the years. But Jay's Journal forwarded the idea that this was the result. This was the work of teenage Satanists. There's a whole passage in the book where Jay and his friends are going out and they're, you know, they're mutilating cattle effectively so they can so they can steal the blood and use the blood for satanic rituals. And this gets picked up in Alberta. And so the Royal Canadian Mounted Police actually end up using Jay's Journal as an investigative tool. And again, this is a an anonymous posthumous teenage diary, largely fabricated. But they end up using Jay's journal as a tool to investigate cattle mutilations. And many of the law enforcement personnel, they come to the same conclusion that this must be teenage Satanists. And their evidence for that is that it's in this book and it boggles the mind. But it really happened, and it happened not that long ago, and it was something that intelligent men and women really believed.

MG: Why do you think people wanted to believe this, whether it was this or whether it was? Go ask Alice and this idea that there is a, you know, an LSD crisis that is going to destroy this younger generation. Why do people want to believe this?

RICK EMERSON: I think amongst other things, as humans and I'm not exempting myself from this, I'm sure that I'm the same on some level that we we have a a hunger for easy answers and simple solutions, especially to complex problems. And especially those problems require awkward conversations with young people about sex or about drugs or about mental health. It is a lot easier on some level just to say, well, we found the answer. We, you know, we found the scapegoat. We know what to blame. And then we can you know, it solves the question of why. So we don't have to endlessly wonder about it. And it allows us to avoid deeper and and more difficult discussions. And you don't look too far over the last few years to find cases of people who are looking for one simple answer that explains why a whole litany of things, either in their own lives or in the country or in the culture or in the world seem to be going wrong. And, you know, we have a very deep and very sometimes destructive attraction to those simple explanations.

MG: We've been very cautious in this conversation. And you are especially in not giving away everything that's in this book, in part because it is a wild story in terms of who Beatrice Sparks, the woman who was ostensibly behind these books, was what she was trying to do and how she managed to do what she did. But do people not have suspicions? I mean. Whether it's not in the fact checking, but beyond that, people who are reading this books, do they not have suspicions that everything might not be as it seemed, and that the story that's laid out in these quote unquote diaries may not be the whole story?

RICK EMERSON: And there were outliers. There were, especially with Go Ask Alice. You know, there were a few reviews early on and, you know, and they were always some isolated voices who said, hang on, this doesn't quite seem like it's on the level or this. This doesn't really sound like the writing of a 15 year old girl. But go ask Alice, for example. It just took on a momentum of its own to some degree, because you're dealing in both of these cases with Go Ask Alice and with Jay's journal, the what is ostensibly the writing of a dead teenager. And in some ways, that pre-emptively blunted a lot of the criticism because nobody wanted to seem like they were stomping on the writing of a dead teenager, and nobody wanted to insult Alice by implying that she didn't exist. And once that started to, you know, was an era of consolidated media, certainly compared to what exists now. And, you know, Consolidated Media has its advantages and disadvantages. And one of the disadvantages is once something gets injected into the media bloodstream, it replicates and it becomes conventional wisdom and it hardens pretty quickly. And I think there was a real reluctance. Nobody wanted to be, you know, the first one to stand up and say, this doesn't seem right. This seems really wrong, especially with the satanic panic, where the moment that's not only something that's in the media and in the culture, but it's something that is having serious, real legal ramifications for people. And so it did become a thing that everyone just sort of sort of accepted or or seemed to accept.

MG: But also as parents, I mean, you get it. You've hinted at this. But there's something seductive about learning about the lives of our children that we may not know everything that's going on. But here's a book that really tells you what's happening. Here's a book that really takes you inside your teenager's life.

RICK EMERSON: Yeah. And if you are a parent who feels locked out of your teenager's life, and if you are trying to understand, you know, what is wrong with kids today and if you are I mean, to be fair, if you're suffering or if you have a real honest, you know, founded fears about the dangers that might be out there for your kid or the things that, you know, some things that might be waiting to harm your child. You're going to look for answers everywhere you possibly can. And that certainly makes a lot of sense. And if you are a the parent of a child who has fallen into addiction or is run away from home and maybe never come back, or if your child has taken their own life, that becomes it becomes its own kind of mental health crisis. If your child commits suicide, those parents face all sorts of, you know, emotional and mental trauma come from that. But the biggest question when a child kills themselves is why? Why did this happen? What warning sign did I miss? What didn't I see? What could I have done? You know, how did this thing happen to this this person, you know, this child of mine that I love and that I tried to protect. And if someone presents an idea that explains it and gives a simple, understandable answer that's incredibly seductive and incredibly appealing, even if it's something that you would normally be suspicious of or not accept.

MG: And so what's the lesson that you think society should learn from what we learn in reading this book?

RICK EMERSON: I think it is that we do have this inherent desire to find a simple one line answer, and that we do have an inborn tendency to to scapegoat and to blame. And that good, intelligent people. And, again, I'm, you know, including myself in this can sometimes believe outlandish, destructive things. You know, the one thing I would note is that 2021, there was a survey that came out from the I believe it's the Public Religious Research Institute that said that, you know, in the States, they broke it up by political party. But they also said that 15% of all Americans believe that the government, media and financial systems are controlled by Satan worshipping paedophiles. So the things that we think are in the rear-view mirror and that we're not capable of, they're still very real dangerous today.

MG: Let me just finally ask you about writing this book. You have an author's note at the beginning that in some ways asks people to turn themselves over to the story and to wait for the ending. Don't flip to the end. Don't Google, don't try to figure this out on your own. But let me take you on the story. Why did you want to write that?

RICK EMERSON: Because it is just an amazing story. I mean, at the beginning of this, when I set out to write this book and it took me nearly seven years to do it, if I had known in the beginning that the story goes literally from Hollywood to the behavioural science lab, you know, the profiling lab at Quantico, the FBI, into the Oval Office, all over the country and, you know, in through North America and that it all goes through this tiny patch of Utah that is also sometimes called the fraud capital of America. I mean, the story is just so unbelievable and it's so big and goes so many places. I never could have imagined that. And, you know, it's like when you go to see a movie and somebody says, oh, hey, you're way better off if you just try not to learn anything about this movie. When you go to theatre, you know, you try not to Google anything about this because by the end of the book, I do answer all of the questions that people have everything they want to know, and I lay out exactly how the story unfolded. But while there are a lot of lessons to be learnt and there's, you know, there are things that undoubtedly apply to the way that life is happening right now. It's also just an amazing story.

MG: It's quite a story indeed. Rick, good to talk to you. Thank you very much.

RICK EMERSON: Thank you so much.

MG: Rick Emerson book is Unmask Alice: The LSD, Satanic Panic and Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries. That is the current for this Thursday cuz. Up next on CBC Radio One, Tom Power speaking with the brilliant Cree artist Kent Monkman. He has a new show on at the Royal Ontario Museum. You'll hear all about it and about museums coming up in just a moment on CBC Radio. Earlier in this programme, we were talking about the issues between employers and employees. When it comes to trust and tracking software. They call it bossware, the software that's used to spy on you when you are working perhaps remotely. People looking into your computer, figuring out what you're doing on that computer. We're gonna leave you today with a song in that spirit. Sting says that this at its heart is really a song about surveillance. It's The Police. Every Breath You Take. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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[Song]

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