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The Current Transcript for December 12, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The feeling of being watched all the time it is as aggressive as being beaten or having things yanked out of your head. It's the same feeling.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: A journalist in a developing country tracked by government spyware. That's a surveillance technique more than one autocratic government uses. But when the government of Ethiopia tried the same thing one of its intended targets got suspicious and contacted the cyber sleuths at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab. They ended up re-engineering the malware to spy on the spies discovering the IP addresses of journalists, lawyers, activists and academics some of them Canadian. All of them tracked with sophisticated spyware bought off the shelf from an Israeli company. We'll bring you that story and the questions it raises in an hour. Also today, what lengths would you go to for self-improvement. Oprah Winfrey famously walked across hot coals at the urging of self-help guru Tony Robbins.

SOUNDCLIP

I was petrified standing there for a minute and then I thought you have to believe we can do it. And then Tony just whispered in my ear "Yes yes yes". I did. I did it.

AMT: Well not to be outdone Andre Spicer and Carl Cedarstrom agreed to spend an entire year in search of self-improvement, indulging and experimenting with cosmetic injections, smart drugs, almost ruining a friendship. And at the end of it all, well, hear their take on it in half an hour. But we're starting in California.

SOUNDCLIP

It's just miles and miles and miles of nothing, just black, white ash. There's a beautiful palm tree farm down there it's just reduced to nothing.

AMT: As wildfires sweep through vulnerable communities a growing consensus that California is looking at its future. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti This is The Currents.

Southern California restaurant remains open despite 'Armageddon' wildfire

Guests: Taylor Stanley, Ed Struzik

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hi honey. It's me. The house is still there. Yes [Crying] everything Looks good.

VOICE 2: Unrelenting and growing.

VOICE 3: It was an inferno. It was like there was just houses going up everywhere.

VOICE 4: Two hundred thousand plus people have been evacuated from all the fires.

VOICE 5: All your life savings and work, for all the years, is gone.

VOICE 6: So many family heirlooms I thought my whole life I'm going to inherit this someday I'm going to pass down to my kids crying] oh God.

VOICE 7: This is kind of the new normal and with climate change. Some scientists are saying Southern California is literally burning up and we're experiencing what it's going to look like on a very regular basis.

AMT: In California. It is far from over half a dozen wildfires are raging today across several counties. Altogether there's an area larger than New York City and Boston combined that is burning. And you heard the last part of that clip the Governor Jerry Brown say this could be the new normal. Over all six major wildfires have destroyed more than 1000 structures. The biggest blaze in the state is in Ventura County known as the Thomas fire. It is among the worst in California's fiery history and it's threatening the coastal city of Santa Barbara. It has also forced both voluntary and mandatory evacuation orders in the town of Carpentaria. But so far the Thomas fire hasn't closed the doors of Esau's cafe. I spoke with Taylor Stanley the cafe's manager earlier, as she helped serve the morning rush.

TAYLOR STANLEY: Hello. Good morning Canada.

AMT: What do you see when you look out your cafe windows at the moment?

TAYLOR STANLEY: It's like the thickest, brownest, chocolaty. I want to say it looks like smog. I want to say it looks like fog but because of the red glow behind everything it looks like nothing you've ever seen until you've been in a fire. It's phenomenal.

AMT: How close is that fire?

TAYLOR STANLEY: Probably about half a mile. But you know we're lucky right now the winds have switched just so instead of blowing down into the town it's blowing back up into the mountain. I mean we're lucky nobody else is lucky. Montecito, Santa Barbara which are the town to the north of us it's it's going towards them now.

AMT: And you can see so much smoke though. What's it like to breathe?

TAYLOR STANLEY: You can't. The minute you step outside you know it's instant headache, your eyes are watering. You know and bless all the organizations that are giving out free masks everywhere for people who haven't been able to evacuate. Here inside our cafe we have 25 foot air filters. So it's like day and night. I mean we're keeping all the windows and doors closed obviously and you cannot even see a half a block down the street but we're breathing easier in here and you can take your masks off.

AMT: How many people are in the cafe right now?

TAYLOR STANLEY: We're doing quite a few people right now. And it's you know it's sad and it's heartwarming at the same time that everyone can come in here and sort of touch bases. And the amount of people that are trying to pay for everybody else's food and pay for the firefighters food - here comes some firefighters right now - and it's just heartwarming, it really is. People just sitting and knitting you know a place to go in and we actually took naps and here the other afternoon because it was the only place with good air quality.

AMT: What kind of evacuation order is the area that you're café's in under right now?

TAYLOR STANLEY: Right now we're under voluntary evacuation but just a few blocks away, literally a few blocks, is mandatory evacuation. So it depends on where you live in this city. But you know I just think everyone that can should evacuate, should get out and come back during the day if they have to. But that's not an option for a lot of people. I mean we ourselves have five cats, four dogs and 20 chickens. So you know it's a hard thing to try to leave everybody and everything.

AMT: Where is your home from where you are in the cafe?

TAYLOR STANLEY: Where about I don't know maybe five blocks away. I also want to say the firefighters are amazing. If anyone wants to look and see this the town of La Conchita, two words, and it was the place where several years ago horrible tragedy happened and landslides came down and just killed a lot of people in the town. And the firefighters lined the perimeters of the city of the town and saved it, two nights ago which was - it was like a miracle really.

AMT: You said some firefighters just walked into your cafe?

TAYLOR STANLEY: So kind of yeah. They've been coming in and kind of going out. Their command center is about 15 miles away. That's where they're you know food and everything's being taken care of. So kind of in between sort of shifts and things they pop in and pop out and you know everything in town is closed and everybody pays for their food and it's just it's pretty amazing.

AMT: They must look pretty drained and tired all those firefighters?

TAYLOR STANLEY: Exhausted. You don't even know. When you see pictures of them sleeping on the concrete just you know where they drop. That's what's happening you. You can't pay these men enough and women you can't you can't thank them enough for what they're doing.

AMT: What kinds of stories are they telling you about what they've seen so far?

TAYLOR STANLEY: You know we're not going there. We let them come in and eat and relax. They all kind of got that sort of make there and we let them do their thing when they're in here. It is kind of a little bit of a sanctuary.

AMT: So how frightened are people of these fires?

TAYLOR STANLEY: Well again it depends on where you live and what part of town you're in because of the pre warning people can get out. It isn't like Santa Rosa which is north of us in California where tragically so many people died they had no early warning system. You know the fires just roared through there was such speed. And for I mean bless everybody here. But we have such good early warning systems and I have to say through social media and through these young people that are live streaming these aren't people who are getting paid on Facebook. There's a young man named Matt Organista. Anyone can log onto him and he is just - he's a citizen and he is tirelessly filming and live streaming and he's the one that got my entire neighborhood up at 2:00 o'clock in the morning. I have a lot of young people in my neighborhood and they're all on Facebook. And you know everyone just said "Matt said get out", and this is hours before the newscasters or our emergency warning systems kicked in.

AMT: So you say that he got you out at 2:00 a.m. How did how did you get out with all the cats and the chickens what did you do? What was that like?

TAYLOR STANLEY: [Laughs] We were all ready to go. We knew the fire was coming in and we had like one little bag for our own personal belongings ready to go. And then the whole rest of our house was filled with cages and you know animal pens and things like that. Sadly we told the chickens stay there on their own. But every other animal had their own their own little cage and we looked like Noah's Ark when we left there.

AMT: What does that look like, Taylor, the burned area?

TAYLOR STANLEY: It looks like Armageddon. It looks like just nothing. It's just miles and miles and miles of nothing, just black white ash. We have a beautiful - in the town there's a beautiful palm tree farm down there it's just reduced to nothing. I don't know. And if we get rains it's going to be even worse. It's going to be flooding and landslides. There's nothing to hold anything into the mountains. This is. This is just the beginning unfortunately.

AMT: Have you ever seen anything like this?

TAYLOR STANLEY: Not in my life ever. I mean we've had local fires, the Tea Fire, the painted cave fire, all tragic all bad. We live in Southern California we have Santa Ana winds. We're used to fires. Nothing. I'm 65. Nothing in my lifetime and friends of mine who were in their 80s have ever seen anything like this.

AMT: The governor of the state says he thinks this will be the new normal.

TAYLOR STANLEY: I agree with him. I'm a supporter of Jerry Brown and I agree with him. I mean you can see year after year after year. You know no water. The drought is going on and on. The weather changes I'm sure you see it up there as well. I mean my son is in Georgia right now and it's snowing on him. It's just like I'm really hoping people pay attention do what they can do.

AMT: Taylor it's really it's good to talk to you. Please take care. Thank you for speaking with me.

TAYLOR STANLEY: Thank you so much and thank you for your interest. And anybody that can you know donate to the Red Cross or firemen's association. You know it would be a great thing for these people. Thank you.

AMT: Thank you. Bye bye.

TAYLOR STANLEY: Take care. Bye bye.

AMT: Taylor Stanley you can hear the clatter of Esau's cafe behind her. She's the manager in downtown Carpinteria in Ventura County, California. Well in that same county many residents have moved into Ted Cross shelters some coming to grips with the fact that their houses are gone, others with the idea that their home was one of the few on the street to survive.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You know everything has just gone behind there all the hills behind there. I mean it's not even... It's a charred tree trunks. There's no vegetation it is like. Just dirt. It's like sand. It is like completely gone. And there isn't anything like it.

VOICE 2: I can't get my neighbourhood. I was able to go up there for 50 minutes under police escort. But no I cannot return home. 90 percent of the houses on my street, burnt. It will rebuild and be a neighborhood but it will not be the same.

AMT: While it was just three weeks ago that I spoke with Ed Struzik here on The Current. He is the author of Firestorm: How Wildfire will Shape our Future. And he was explaining how the worst wildfire season in British Columbia's history this past summer was part of a pattern of mega fires seen in Canada and the U.S. And he specifically talked about his research on California and how many parts of the world need to adapt to a new wildfire reality. So here we are again. Ed Struzik is a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University. He's in Edmonton today. Hi, Ed.

ED STRUZIK: Hello.

AMT: What are you thinking as you watch these fires burn?

ED STRUZIK: You know it never ceases to amaze. You know that these things are coming. But then when you see the images and you hear the story that we were just told on the radio it it breaks your heart. And it also just makes - I guess it's like any weather event that you see sometimes extreme weather events, you just stand back in awe and you really feel powerless.

AMT: Is this really the new normal?

ED STRUZIK: I don't have any doubt about it. I think this is a challenge, a global challenge. We're not just seeing it in in California or in British Columbia it's happening in Portugal. It's been happening for a long time in Australia, Chile. The world is seeing fires burning bigger, hotter and faster and the hazards are changing and we're just not adapting fast enough.

AMT: And it's late in the season even for Californians, is it not?

ED STRUZIK: It is but you know firefighters have been talking about the 12 month a year, yearlong fire season for some time. And you look at Canada for example, we had wildfires in Waterton National Park and Crowsnest Pass this year. In October, weeks after there was a big snowstorm in the mountains and watered and burned like it's never burned before at least in recorded human history. So I think you know we're seeing an extension of the fire season on both sides and there is temperature combined with drought and heavy winds that drive these things. And there's really nothing we can do to stop it, once it gets to a certain size.

AMT: I want to ask you a little bit more about the intensity of fire. So Waterton was very intense. What are are the implications of a fire that burns so intensely?

ED STRUZIK: Well in the case of Waterton I haven't seen it but I've been told about it by many people who are investigating it is that you know most fires do not knock down, burn the entire tree. You'll go through fire and you still see the snags still standing and they're beneficial for owls and other critters that that burrow into them. What happened in Waterton in so many places on the mountainside is that it burned everything down to charcoal. What that does is generally is that it prevents [unintelligible]. I mean if it burned all of the seeds and all the nutrients in the soil nothing's going to grow back. So we'll have a case like California that there will be mudslides. I think that Parks Canada will probably have to look at closing off certain areas where you know hikers go through elevated routes and they be vulnerable.

AMT: Well we just heard our last guest Taylor Stanley say that if there are rains now, she talked about flooding and landslides because there's nothing to grip the earth.

ED STRUZIK: That's right. Yeah you know when you think about it when it rains the trees and the grasses and the shrubs on a mountainside or a hill side absorbs all that moisture. And it kind of holds the hillside together. It depends on the geology of the area. But many areas are very vulnerable to this kind of episode. They literally fall apart. The moisture just sort of has nowhere to go. So it just slides down the mountainside and it carries everything with it. And in some cases it can be - if it's a hazardous waste site - that could be extremely dangerous for a community that might be downstream along a riverbed.

AMT: So how much of this is directly related to climate change?

ED STRUZIK: Well you know we've always had fires and we've had big fires in the past. There's no question about it. It's part of nature. It's a way of rejuvenating a force. But in the case of climate change it's a pretty simple formula that for every one degree increase in temperature, you're going to need 15 percent more rainfall to restore the balance of moisture in a forest. And second, rising temperatures intensify drought and the spread of tree killing diseases and insects, such as the mountain pine beetle. And that makes forests more vulnerable to fire. And third, the warmer gets the more lightning there will be. There is one or several studies that suggest we're going to see 50 percent increase in lightning strikes this century. In the case of places like California, Alberta, B.C. where you have mountains, when it gets warmer it also gets windier. I think those four things just spell disaster down the road for many people, many communities that are in the line of fire.

AMT: I've got a clip here of Alexandra Syphard senior research scientist at the conservation conservation biology institute in Oregon. Listen to what she says about the role of climate change in these fires.

SOUNDCLIP

My colleagues and I have done some historical analyses looking at the relationship between climate patterns and wildfires and we've found that there is a signal in some parts of California, like the higher elevations forested region there's a stronger link between climate and fire, whereas in areas like Southern California with the fires that we're experiencing right now, the climate component is not as straightforward.

AMT: What do you make of that, Ed Struzik?

ED STRUZIK: It I don't believe it. I think the proof will come. But I think the big difference between now and the past is that we've now got you know in the United States alone 46 million single family homes. Several hundred thousand businesses and 120 million people living and working in and around the country's forests. And that pace of development is continuing and it's most pronounced in the American West and it's also very pronounced in Canada. And when you put people in this environment, it doesn't matter whether or not climate change is a factor. Even if you go back 100 years and you have that many people you still got a big big problem because mega fires occur. They have occurred in the past. They're just going to occur more often in the future.

AMT: You make the point as well that this is a public health issue.

ED STRUZIK: It is you know this this you know what they're experienced right now in California is a toxic mix of hydrocarbons and chemicals you know that come from a wildfire and come from burning buildings and people are exposed to that. Most people don't understand that the chemicals that you find in tobacco are all pretty much present in wildfires smoke. The good thing about California is they do have these places like restaurants that have air filters that people can go to during the daytime. We really don't have much of that in Canada. You know that everybody basically is told in Edmonton or Vancouver or Victoria when there's a big fire burning there is that 'just shut your windows don't exercise'. But you know for most people with respiratory problems that's really not good enough. You know this year out west we experienced the smoke from the wildfires. You could close the windows all day long unless you had air filters. You couldn't escape it.

AMT: Ed Struzik lots to think about as we watch this unfold. Thanks for your time today.

ED STRUZIK: Thank you.

AMT: Ed Struzik is a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University. He's the author of Fire Storm: How Wildfire will Shape our Future. He joined us from Edmonton. Stay with us. The news is next and then?

SOUNDCLIP

Every day in every way I am getting better and better. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better.

AMT: Every day in every way plenty of us are trying to get better and better but has our culture of self-improvement turned into something unhealthy? Right after the news we'll be talking to two self-help obsessives who spent a year trying everything they could find and paying for it, to talk about self-improvement. We'll hear from them next time Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

These authors dedicated a year to self-improvement. Here's what they learned

Guests: Carl Cederstrom, Andre Spicer

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come: It's never been easier for governments to keep track of and spy on dissidents even when they are overseas. And it's not just the case for the major powers with well-heeled intelligence operations. Now that spyware software can be bought virtually off the shelf, virtually any country can get into the game. Coming up in half an hour we'll hear from one of the dozens of dissidents who appear to be victims of a spyware operation from the Ethiopian state. But first the never ending quest to be your best self.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hey when lunch is over. Want to go back to the office and run up and down the stairwell with me? My Fidbit says that I'm at 5,348 steps and I need to hit 10,000 today.

VOICE 2: I'd love to buy my Fidbit says I'm only getting three hours of quality sleep at night. So, I kind of just need to go back to the office and have a nap.

VOICE 1: Okay. Marty you want to join?

VOICE 3: Oh I would but my Funbit so I'm going to drink this thermos of wine.

AMT: The ladies of CBC's Baroness Von Sketch with their send-up of our cultural obsession with self-improvement. Beyond our Fitbits and health and fitness trackers on our watches and phones, our social media feeds are chock-a-block with tips for becoming a new and better you. There are articles galore on 'how to let go of anger, eat more antioxidants optimize your morning routine'. In fact some say our obsession with self-improvement is verging on the unhealthy. Of course self-betterment is hardly a new phenomenon. Think back to Norman Vincent Peale and his 1950s bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking.

SOUNDCLIP

One reason that the positive thinker gets positive results is he is not afraid of a problem. As a matter of fact he finds problems exciting.

AMT: Okay well there are countless gurus carrying on that message. Though one may stand slightly taller than the rest.

SOUNDCLIP

What makes people fail? Who here in this room because it failed to achieve what you really want in life, a goal, a dream, a desire? Raise your hands and say 'I'. We all fail. So here is my question: When you fail to achieve the goal. Why did you fail tell me? You quit too soon. Very nice, honestly it's good to hear. This is great Give me a hand for that please.

AMT: Well OK. That would be Tony Robbins my next guests set themselves quite an ambitious goal. They spent a year as guinea pigs completely immersed in the self-improvement movement; that meant everything from trying to learn a new language and boosting memory power to attending a New Age retreat and enduring multiple injections for cosmetic enhancement. They share the story in a new book called desperately seeking self-improvement. A year inside the optimization movement. Carl Cederstrom is an associate professor at the Stockholm business school at Stockholm University. Andre Spicer is a professor at the Cass Business School at City University in London, England. They're both in New York City. Hello.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Hello.

ANDRE SPICER: Hi there.

AMT: So Carl why did you want to go deep into the self-improvement world? What were you hoping to discover?

CARL CEDERSTROM: We had been interested in self-improvement and optimization culture for a relatively long time and also wrote our previous book on the topic. And people pointed out when that book came out [unintelligible] the syndrome. Did we have any first hand experiences of this ourselves and the truth was that we didn't really have any experiences at all. So we thought if were going to do our next book it is going to be about those experiences but we were both really hesitant at the start. We were thinking we would write a book which would be more like a novel and we would invent two characters to put them through all of these experiences. But as we were going to start writing the book we thought maybe we should just do it ourselves, and instead of having those fictive characters we should do it in a more kind of journalistic and scientific way and put ourselves through this and then record experiences as we go through trying to optimize pretty much every area of our lives that we could think of.

AMT: It's kind of fun too because then we can, as the reader, we can be voyeurs into your little experiment. André what exactly is the optimisation movement?

ANDRE SPICER: So the optimization movement is really the kind of self-help 3.0 if you like. So it's really where someone like Norman Vincent Peale and Anthony Robbins who we heard earlier meets with Silicon Valley technology. And they want to kind of improve your life but you're using all sorts of technological gadgets and gizmos and mechanisms of sort of measuring and quantifying your life in order to do it. It's kind of like a tailorizing for the self. Where you're turning yourself into this kind of balance sheet which you constantly measuring, managing and checking off. And even when you're asleep you're trying to kind of quantify your sleep in order to improve it.

AMT: And Carl are we now in an age where self-improvement is synonymous with being morally good?

CARL CEDERSTROM: I think we are and you can see how self-improvement has become so deeply integrated into our lives and everything from school and on our work. So we could really see how how self-improvement is something that we all take for granted. You know why would you not like to become a better person. And this of course is related to how society is organized today around principles of computation and a very individualistic notion of doing your best to optimize your own abilities and potentialities.

AMT: Each month was dedicated to a specific pursuit, January is productivity, July is pleasure. Carl how is July.

CARL CEDERSTROM: July was by far the best month of the year I should say. So it's a little bit ironic I suppose doing a book on self-improvement and when I have to single out the one thing I enjoy the most over the course of the year it has to be picking up smoking again after having quit six years ago. And you know I'm not recommend thing and want to pick up smoking but compared to all the other things we tried of the year that was one of the few things that was just deeply pleasant. But I was doing that only for 10 days then spending a lot of time cooking great food. And by the end of the month the last 10 days I made sure to do nothing and lived by the noble principle of idleness which is an elevated way of really doing nothing at all.

ANDRE SPICER: Well Carl was enjoying himself smoking. I'd been a vegetarian for 16 years and I picked up eating meat again which some of it was good and some of it was bad. And then I went on an old junk food diet for a few weeks and spent my time playing video games which again many of my friends would find that deeply pleasurable. I found that rather unpleasurable to say the least.

AMT: [Chuckles] And Andre your pleasure months was very different from your month dedicated to optimizing your sex life, because you had one of those months too.

ANDRE SPICER: Indeed. So this was a very difficult month for me. Carl and I have talked about many things but we realized that one thing we hadn't talked about really before was our sex lives. And I felt like I had not really talked about this with many people. You know Wittgenstein the philosopher in his book talks about [unintelligible] which 'you cannot speak, you must remain silent' and I felt like this was a bit about sex to me. So I tried to first of all try you know to talk about sex. There's a program called Sexersize where you can kind of do an exercise to improve your sexual performance. Then went on and tried out some techniques used from the pickup industry and then finally on towards the end of the month found myself in a tantric sex workshop, walking around almost having kind of close sex with some sort of stranger. It was a rather strange experience.

AMT: And Carl you were trying to buy sex toys.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well I was trying to optimize masturbation and become multi orgasmic. So I was trying to take this very seriously. So I went to see experts. I was reading the books and using all the different techniques that are being suggested. And also buying various sex toys but I came up against my own barriers over and over again. But I think I did find out what the barrier was in that particular pursuit to becoming multi orgasmic. And that is that according to these people - sometimes referring to themself as sexual Kong Fu Masters, is what you need to come to a point where you're actually making love yourself. And I can think of many people I would not like to have sex with and unfortunately I would have to put myself into that category. So that was it possible, really.

AMT: [Laughs] That was a new discovery for you, was it?

CARL CEDERSTROM: I've never tried it before but when trying it I felt I'm not going to try this again.

AMT: Let's go to November. You both focused on attention. Let's listen to a bit of that.

SOUNDCLIP

AUTOMATED MESSAGE: The next station is Kent Street.

ANDRE SPICER: Hi everybody. I have been on this journey this year. I grow up hating my own body. Society told me I just was good enough. I thought there is something wrong with me because I did not have the right kind of body. And what I really hope is that by sharing this with you today, you are going to see yourself differently. We are all brothers and sisters. We are all equal. This is just a vessel. So thank you all for listening.

[Applaude]

AMT: Andre, explain what we are hearing there.

ANDRE SPICER: As I was listening to this I was wincing. It was towards the end of the month. And my aim was to get as much media exposure as possible. So I'd been studying various kinds of viral media techniques and I decided that what I was going to do was to go onto the subway the tube in London and repeat a stunt which had been pulled by a New York model called Escarra Lorance, where she'd stood and given a speech about positive body image . And I'd basically written the speech out and I repeated it word for word, standing in my underwear on a train on Saturday night to stunned onlookers and passengers.

AMT: We heard some applause there. What was the look on their face?

ANDRE SPICER: Well people immediately in front of me were a group of 60 year old people on their way to the theatre. And they didn't look very pleased but further down the carriage where drunken revellers who are in their 20s and they seemed to enjoy it very much. By the end of it the whole carriage was applauding my message.

AMT: Do you take notes as you go? What do you do? You run home and write notes?

ANDRE SPICER: Yeah the idea is that each day we would go home and keep a quite close record of of what happens. And then our own experiences of it try to be as objective in the description as possible and also our own emotional reactions about it.

AMT: And where there are times when it was just a really daunting and you thought "oh no I have to do this today"?

CARL CEDERSTROM: I think almost every day was like that. But there were ups and downs during the year and I think our relationship was coming to an all-time low in March and luckily April was set to start to optimize relationships. From the start the plan was to try to become better fathers, better husbands. But we saw that as an opportunity to try and do something about our relationship. So we found our cognitive behavioural therapists who were giving therapy online, over Skype. So we were doing therapy with her over the month and trying to find ways of getting ourselves through this very difficult time.

AMT: What were the problems? Why were you having a difficult time as friends?

ANDRE SPICER: If you asked each of us what you would get different reactions. But I guess it's when you work so intensely with each other on such a strict [unintelligible]. We're talking to each other every day and we had to kind of live up to quite high demands and sometimes we failed. So in March for instance, I ended up failing on my objective which was to learn coding in one month. As a result Carl sent me a punishment which was to go to a Speakers Corner in Hyde Park in London and give a speech to people of around about a hundred people on the topic of 'why I am an ass hole'. As you would imagine I wasn't very happy with doing this.

AMT: You both seem to think the other one thought less of you. Do you like each other now?

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well I think we are slowly getting back into the friendship we had when starting this. But as Andre says I mean one of the sort of interesting insights that we have, with some hindsight, is that pushing yourself this hard and trying to apply all of that to the soul of self-improvement and doing that together with someone, you beginning to be very punishing both in relationship to yourself, but also in relationship to this other person your with. So I think we came to the conclusion both of us, by the end of the year, part of the explanation why we had become not enemies but why we had difficulties was partly because of this attitude that we had adopted and embraced very closely.

ANDRE SPICER: And it was this idea I guess that you constantly - even if you hit your limits you have to go beyond them.

AMT: You know and some of your challenges - I want to talk about a few more of them. Which month was it, Carl, you decided to learn French and then you just to up the ante you committed yourself to doing an interview in French live on air.

CARL CEDERSTROM: So while Andreas punishment was to speak at Speakers Corner, my punishment was to learn friends in one month and go on radio to speak French. And I think if I have to single out one moment that was the most dreadful during the year; it's by far that radio interview. And coming in through studio and the radio interviewer understanding that my friends is - well not non-existent but very close to nonexistent. And I was sitting there with all my notes and struggling to get through a one hour long interview.

AMT: How's your friend now.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well it was becoming so traumatic trying to learn French in one month. So I've not been able to go back to friends since then but still thinking that I should do that.

AMT: Did all these attempts at self-improvement make you self-righteous with other people?

ANDRE SPICER: Well I think so strangely enough I started out as you know quite accepting person. But during the year I started to think 'well if you only work harder, if you only committed yourself more, if you only use the techniques of deliberative practice or develop your grit, then you could achieve things'. So I found myself even giving my mother in law motivational advice and crafting little slogans for her to help her new way of writing this book which she'd been talking about writing for many many years.

AMT: You had your mother in law used the pomodoro. The tomato.

ANDRE SPICER: Yes the pomodoro. So this was one thing which both Carl and I probably go around recommending to others, which is if you have an unpleasant task ahead of you - whether that's you know writing something you don't want to do or reading something or doing the dishes - you set 25 minutes aside and you work on it and then once it's up, it rings, you have a five minute break and then you go on and keep them working like this.

AMT: And you're supposed to use the tomato shaped kitchen timer right. That's where it got the name The Pomodoro. Andre, August was creativity month. You admit you're not a naturally funny guy. You set out to become a stand up comedian. How did that go?

ANDRE SPICER: Indeed. So at the beginning of the month. I was a little bit lost for what to do. So I was sort of fishing around for ideas and eventually I kind of came to the idea that I'll try and become a stand-up comic. And my parents were visiting from New Zealand at the time and they sat down. My father sort of said "well what are you up to these days, son?" And I said "well this month I'm trying to become a stand-up comedian." He looked into the distance and then turned back and said "well our family's not not so naturally funny." But nonetheless I went on and learned stand-up comedy and performed at the Edinburgh Festival which is the world's biggest stand-up comedy festival. I got precisely two laughs and then I decided that I tried again, following the advice of deliberative practice and then I got about five laughs at a large Comedy Club in London. Nonetheless, I felt quite exhilarated from the experience and I suddenly somehow got this strange idea that I had an alternative Korea waiting for me as a stand-up comic. Hopefully, I've got rid of this idea now.

AMT: You got rid of it now?

ANDRE SPICER: Well we'll see.

AMT: Yes. Carl one of the crazier experiments you tried was to transform how you looked and you got some injections would you do?

CARL CEDERSTROM: This was in November. And the idea was to optimize attention. And I wanted to see if I could make myself more good looking. And I wanted to do this in an as objective way as possible. So the first thing I did was to take photographs and different selfies of myself. And I was putting it on an internet forum called Reddit and they have our thread there 'rate my appearance' and then people were giving suggestions what I could do to become better looking, and they gave me grades on my looks. And after that I went to cut my hair with a very expensive hairdresser and dyed my hair. Then I went to a plastic surgeon and I came in and said "What could you do to make me look better?" And she said that I had a very boyish look and she wanted to and enhanced my manly features to make me look a bit more like George Clooney, is what she said. So I agreed on it. And she injected seven milliliters of something called Restalane which at that time I didn't know what it was. But my chin got a lot bigger and after that I went to wax my chest and I had a spray tan and then I had our professional fashion photographer take my photos. And meanwhile I had opened Instagram account and started to put pictures online. And by the very end of this month I was posting my new pictures on Reddit asking the users to say what they thought about my look now. And that was really interesting because one person said before five out of ten, now six.

AMT: All that worked for one point? [Laughs]

CARL CEDERSTROM: All that work. I think that said something about self-improvement. Because when I was spending my days looking at other gym selfies on Instagram you begin to understand what an enormous amount of effort you have to put down in order to get that kind of body. And we often think about this culture as very self-obsessed and very narcissistic. But it's also, and maybe it's a lot of degree, self-annihilating and self-obliterating and almost bordering on masochism because the amount of pain and suffering you need to go through that is very difficult and hard work.

AMT: And you had those wrestling injections and you went home and your partner Sally, you asked her what she thought. What did she say?

CARL CEDERSTROM: Well she didn't notice it at first, and I also could not see any difference. She couldn't. I mean it's very subtle. But I think if you look on my Instagram account then - Can I say the name of the Instagram account?

AMT: Sure.

CARL CEDERSTROM: People want to look. It's Optimized2016. So there you would find before and after pictures. And I think the line, you can see it. It's a little more distinct after the surgery or the injection than it was before.

AMT: You're kind of telling me though that sometimes optimization leads to sort of demoralization.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Yes I mean definitely what happens when you do this kind of thing is you are - Well I mean it's I think it's based on addiction in some ways. You do something you can see a so small improvements and you carry on than you do this. What eventually becomes a very destructive behavior. And I think at the bottom of this is a sense of not being good enough for us [unintelligible]. And I think what this book is trying to show is that when you try and turn your life inside out, and try to optimize every aspect of your life, it is going to be very tough. You're going to develop a mindset. It is really going to be very harsh not only on yourself but also on other people. And I think sadly much of this is feeding into a kind of individualistic and punishing culture that we have to [unintelligible]

AMT: Which of your experiments still haunts you and keeps you awake at night?

CARL CEDERSTROM: For me the one that is still haunting me a little bit is of course the sex month. And I felt very uncomfortable being so open and sort of oversharing these experiences. So that is the one that I still feel a little bit uncomfortable with. My daughter coming to the age where she can read this.

ANDRE SPICER: And for me one of the things I guess I'd sort of found difficult was the actual kind of reflection on what this all meant. Because you know we spend a whole year trying to sort of you know to take these things out. And then we had to sort of reflect on what was the purpose of all this? What did we actually learn from all of this? In some ways we began to realize maybe this was all sort of meaningless in some ways. Like it was all just pointing at the absurdity of self-help. And as soon as you kind of stopped trying to improve yourself is this kind of return to the ways you were almost beforehand. The kind of old habits kick back in. And it points out in some ways this is all about this kind of futile attempts by humans to escape from their obligations or escape from the big questions in life which is like purpose meaning and in some cases even your own inevitable demise.

AMT: In your day to day life as you pass a bookshelf, as you see the adds, as you see the billboards on self-improvement what do you think about that now that you've gone through this year?

ANDRE SPICER: Strangely I have this increasing desire to give these things a try sometimes. So the current thing in London which is very popular is the Wim Hof method which involves getting into cold water for three or four hours in order to invigorate your body. And when I saw this was having it at a local kind of yoga centre I wanted to go and try it. But then I had to stop myself. So I've developed a kind of strange curiosity towards this, like the people in top gear I want to try cause I sort of want to have some strange sort of curiosity towards these things, but then think Well that's part of my life is maybe over for now.

AMT: Except what could possibly go wrong, just one more try. [Laughs] What about you, Carl?

CARL CEDERSTROM: Almost the opposite relationship to self-improvement now to what Andre described. So we were doing this was so intensively for one year it was everywhere around. And now I see self-improvement everywhere. So for me it's very difficult to draw the line between self-improvement and most other things that are around us in life. So I almost feel as if everything has become self-improvement and not being particularly keen or interested in trying the new techniques or new technologies or new strategies.

AMT: It's a fascinating way to look at the industry. Thank you both.

ANDRE SPICER: Thank you very much.

CARL CEDERSTROM: Thank you.

AMT: Carl Cederstrom an associate professor at the Stockholm business school in Stockholm University. Andre Spicer professor at the Cass Business School at City University in London, England. Together they share their obsessions in the book Desperately Seeking Self-improvement: A Year Inside the Optimisation Movement. They joined us from New York City. Over to you now, what are the best or worst courses of self-improvement you have embarked upon? Any tips, tricks to share with fellow listeners? New Year's resolutions are close of course. Send us an email from our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. You can always find us on Facebook and tweet us @TheCurrentCBC and stay with us in our next half hour. The latest field to be disrupted by technology may be intelligence and spying. What does it mean when spyware technology is readily available to all governments? Will hear one Ethiopian dissident story of being spied on in about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Ethiopian government used spyware against dissidents: report

Guests: Dmitri Vitaliev, Jawar Mohammed, Bill Marczak

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Cheering]

AMT: Those are sounds from Irreecha religious festival in October of 2016 outside the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. At least 55 people were killed that day in a stampede after police fired tear gas into the crowds. The deaths would spark nationwide protests and within days of that a different kind of countermeasure got underway: Cyber-attacks. Jawar Mohammed for one was not surprised. He is a well-known activist from Oromo the Ethiopian region where the festival was held. He is also the director of the Oromia Media Network which has tens of millions of television viewers in Ethiopia, even though neither he nor the network is based in the country. Jawar Mohammed lives in Minnesota. He figured if the Ethiopian government wanted to curb independent reporting of the protests he and that network would be obvious targets. What did surprise him was how he was targeted. Jawar Mohammed joins us from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hello.

JAWAR MOHAMMED: Hello. How are you doing?

AMT: I'm fine. Let's start with that time in October of 2016. Ethiopian government declares a state of emergency amidst the protests. How volatile was that situation?

JAWAR MOHAMMED: So they killed hundreds of people at this festival, attended by four million people. That is why the street anger, lot of protests and the government are using lethal forces. They end up killing more people again. And we in the media we're providing the domestic as well as international community with information from every village. So the situation was extremely intense. The government was very nervous. The population was angry. So it was during this time that they tried to hack me.

AMT: So when did you start to suspect that they were targeting you online?

JAWAR MOHAMMED: Even before that they were trying to use different hackers from Russia, from China to get into my e-mail. Also they were attacking our Web sites through denial of service attacks. Our satellite transmission was jammed probably about 20 or 23 times. So we were very cautious about their intention. So when this suspicious e-mail came I did not open it. I posted it to IT department. They look at it. They suspected that it might be a spyware. From then we conducted Citizen Lab people and with them we uncovered the source of this attempt.

AMT: And so it was a suspicious e-mail. Why was it suspicious? What did it say?

JAWAR MOHAMMED: Well it looked like it came from people I know. It says 'click on this link'. And when you click on that link - You Tube link normally opens when you click on it. This one when you click on it, it says you have to download another third party software from Adobe. That was quite strange. So I stopped there and I got back to our IT people. That's how we started.

AMT: Okay so that was your clue when you - as you said - you contacted Citizen Lab and we've got someone from Citizen Lab joining us. Bill Marczak. He's a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab which is the University of Toronto facility that studies surveillance and content filtering on the Internet, among other things. Bill Marczak joins us from Berkeley, California. Hi.

BILL MARCZAK: Hi. How are you?

AMT: I'm well okay so you can pick up the story. You were contacted by them.What did you and the team at Citizen Lab do when you took a look at this e-mail that Jawar Mohommad had?

BILL MARCZAK: So we looked at the e-mail Jawar sent us. And I think the one he forwarded us first said something like 'confidential video exposed' and it had a link that looked like it was going to this Web site called Eastafro.com which is a Eritrean video portal. But when we looked at the link it actually appeared that someone had registered a Web site to look like eastafro.com which was called eastafro.net. So it was a lookalike Web site which was our immediate clue that something was suspicious.

AMT: And of course he's uploading stuff, like he's obviously working in Minnesota because he can't work there. And they think you know it would be something he might want to click on. So you looked at it what did you find?

BILL MARCZAK: Well so what we did was we clicked on this link in a virtual machine which is basically a way to click on things or open things without risking damaging your actual computer. So we opened up the link and the first thing we saw was the same thing that Jawar saw which was the message asking to update your Adobe Flash Player. We noticed that if you clicked on that message it took you to another Web site which was designed to impersonate the Web sites to download Adobe Flash. So they were impersonating Adobe. So we downloaded that the file there and then ran it inside the virtual machine and observed its behavior to see exactly what it was doing. And we determined that if someone had downloaded and installed this malicious flash update it would have started sending information from the computer back to a to a server on the Internet which is a telltale sign of spyware.

AMT: Okay, is this illegal?

BILL MARCZAK: Well typically it's illegal for a private individual to use spyware against someone else. However when it's a government that's doing it you know they can say "well we're doing this under our you know lawful intercept laws". So if if the government is indeed following that procedure then it's probably not illegal under local law. But the problem is that governments, like Ethiopia and other places, the rules and oversight regarding lawful intercept are lacking. So this sort of stuff happens.

AMT: And how did you figure it was the government of Ethiopia?

BILL MARCZAK: Well so we suspected it was the government because of two things. The first thing was that we were able to trace the spyware from the sample that Jawar sent us to a company called Cyberbit, based in Israel. So what we did was we found a sample of the spyware that looked similar to that fake Adobe Flash update on a Web site used by computer security researchers, where people submit suspicious files. So once we had that second sample, we noticed that that second sample was signed by this company Cyberbit. And from there we looked at its Web site found out that this is the company that sells claims to sell exclusively to governments. So that was our first clue that there was a government involved. We traced it to Ethiopia because surprisingly the spyware had this very weird thing which was that the spyware server had a publicly accessible log file. Now this is not typically something that you want to have on your spyware server if you're running a secret operation. So I think that probably the company forgot that this feature was there and the log file showed who was logging in to check the results of the spyware. In other words who was logging into to download the data that was being uploaded by infected computers and we found an IP address traced to Ethiopia.

AMT: Amazing. So at some point you were re-engineering it to actually try to continue to spy on the spying. Am I right?

BILL MARCZAK: Well so what we were doing was we were looking at this - at this public log file. And this allowed us to trace the targets. In other words who was being targeted, who was being infected. And from that we were able to get IP addresses. In other words sort of Internet phone numbers if you will. And from this in some cases we were able to identify the individuals. Often you know IP addresses are dynamic so they rotate and you can't necessarily pinpoint a specific individual. But by looking at their behavior over time we could see things like 'oh well this this person was in Canada for a period of time then they traveled to London' and then we could ask around and say "hey do we know anyone in the Oromo community or the broader Ethiopian diaspora community that is fairly senior and was in Canada and then traveled to London?" for instance. From there we could potentially look at and trace down targets.

AMT: And so what did you discover? How many people and what kinds of professions were they trying to track with this stuff?

BILL MARCZAK: Well so from our analysis of the log file it seems that about 43 people were targeted or were successfully infected over a period of a year. And these people were all around the world from countries like Canada to the U.S., some people in Eritrea as well. So you know most of the people that we were able to identify were either Oromo activists or other Ethiopian diaspora activists. There were actually some members of the Eritrean government also that seemed to have been compromised, based on the the IP addresses that we found.

AMT: And I understand you were also targeted at one point.

BILL MARCZAK: Yes so that was that was another very unusual part of this. What was happening was right after Jawar was targeted, I was trying to reach out to other members of the Oromo community to see if they had received similar suspicious e-mails. This is one of the techniques we commonly use in our investigations to broaden our knowledge of the circle of targets. So as I was several days into this process, I woke up one morning and I found this e-mail in my inbox that said - it just had you know one sentence in it and the lnk - and the sentence was Martin Plaut and the politics of famine in Ethiopia. And it was a link and I thought to myself "Hmm. This is this kind of weird. I don't even know who Martin Plaut is. Why would someone say this?" So I hovered over the link in the e-mail to see where it went before I clicked on it. And it popped up as as this website eastafro.net, which was the Web site being used by attackers. And I thought "Wow. Someone just targeted me!"

AMT: Wow. Does that happen to you often as you as you start to investigate other people's some problems with cyber?

BILL MARCZAK: Usually it doesn't happen. Usually the government if they you get wind of the fact that I'm reaching out to people to try and map this stuff out. They will you know look at this and say "oh maybe this is someone we shouldn't target" because you know targeting the people that are investigating you, who have knowledge of these sorts of tech hacking techniques is probably not not the best thing to do.

AMT: Well Jawar, as you're listening to all of this, when you realized that so many lawyers and journalists and other activists were being targeted what did you think in the Diaspora, what did you think?

JAWAR MOHAMMED: I thought nobody was safe. Because apparently after Bill and his colleagues explain to me what this spyware does, somebody sitting in Africa can turn on your computer, watch you, listen to you. They don't just access your email or other... They can actually turn on a microphone. And when I hear what kind of people are targeted I was worried that this is very expensive spyware - spying mechanism that compromises not only the target but also people who communicate with the target. My concern and my worry was not so much people who are in America or here, but people back home in Ethiopia who communicate with us. For example, if my email or my Facebook was compromised they will get all our confidential informants, freelance journalists and all kind of people who report to us. The government see us as enemy and sees myself and the media have been charged with [unintelligible] charges of terrorism. You know hundreds of people who are inside Ethiopia, under the government's control, could be exposed. They could face jail time, torture and even be killed. So it was a nightmare situation to realize how far they are willing to go.

AMT: This Cyberbit from an Israeli company, Bill Marczak, how much would Ethiopia have to pay to get their hands on that?

BILL MARCZAK: Well so we don't know exactly. Each company and the commercial surveillance industry charges different rates. But we have sort of an idea based on several previous spying tools that Ethiopia has purchased. So a couple of years ago, back in 2015, there was a leak from a company called Hacking Team, an Italian company that sells spyware and hacking services similar to Cyberbit. And a copy of a contract between this company and Ethiopia was leaked which showed that Ethiopia had paid an installation fee of around 1 million euros, and then ongoing maintenance fees of around several tens of thousands of euros per year. Of course if the government wants to spy on more people at the same time they have to pay more money. That's sort of how the licensing works here. So if the government says "hey I want to spy on thirty computers all at the same time" maybe there's you know tens of thousands of dollars in fees. But if they want to spy on maybe 100 or 1000, then those can go up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

AMT: So we're looking at spyware being used by autocratic governments essentially that they buy off the shelf. Are there no regulations on who these companies can sell to? Or is this the idea?

BILL MARCZAK: Well typically they'll be export control regulations which are enforced up at the local government level. So in the case of Cyberbit, they would have had to go to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and get permission to export. But typically my understanding is that these export control processes, whether they're in Israel or European countries, typically only look at the national security implications of the sale, as well as the foreign relations implications. Human rights often is a is a thing which is missing from this process. So in this case I imagine the the Ministry of Defense said "oh well, Ethiopia. I don't see any national security problem with that. There's probably no foreign relations issue with that. So you can go ahead and make the sale".

AMT: What about Canadians Ethiopians here in Canada are being spied on by the Ethiopian government? Would Canada have a problem with that?

BILL MARCZAK: You know I'd imagine that in any case whether it's Canada or the U.S. or any other country, that the government would be concerned about the fact that a foreign government could essentially conduct these espionage operations on its soil.

AMT: So Jawar Mohammed, you're in Minnesota. So it looks like other people in the diaspora are being watched.

JAWAR MOHAMMED: Yes they have been watching a number of senior political activists and academics and others. We were able to identify some of the IPs, reached out to these people. Some of them we were able to [unintelligible] their computer and find a solution and stop the spying. But still I do believe there are more people whom the government is following.

AMT: Bill Marczak, how often do you run across this kind of thing, like this specific kind of thing that you managed to track down?

BILL MARCZAK: Well so typically the way that this works is these investigations start when targets like Jawar forward e-mails to the Citizen Lab and then we begin our investigation. So at any time at the Citizen Lab we have probably three or four, five, maybe half a dozen investigations going on at once. And if we're lucky we're able to find some way to trace this down, trace it back to the company, trace it back to a government or corporate actor. You don't always get that lucky. But I'd say you know Cyberbit, this is the fourth commercial surveillance vendor that we've been able to expose after [unintelligible] like FinFisher based in Germany, Hacking Team based in Italy, and NSO Group based in Israel. So this industry is you know very very big. There’s lots of companies and we probably don't have the feasibility into the entire industry. But you know it's through the efforts of people like Jawar and other targets and diligently monitoring and noticing these suspicious emails that we can you know do our research.

AMT: It's all fascinating thank you for bringing us up to speed on it. Thank you both.

JAWAR MOHAMMED: Thank you

BILL MARCZAK: Thank you.

AMT: This is Bill Marczak, he's a senior research fellow with the Citizen Lab a research laboratory at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. We reached him in Berkeley. California today. Jawar Mohammed is an Ethiopian activist and the director of the Oromia Media Network, a U.S. based television network that broadcasts into Ethiopia. We reached him in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Well we did reach out to Canada's Privacy Commissioner Daniel Tarion for comment on this story. A spokesperson replied that online surveillance by foreign governments is outside his office's jurisdiction and we were directed to global affairs. We did contact global affairs. No one in global affairs got back to us. We also reached out to the Ethiopian Embassy in Ottawa a spokesperson there said no one was available to speak to this issue today. It is an issue however that is important to the Montreal based non-profit organization Equality. It provides support, training and digital protection for journalists activists and civil society workers worldwide including Ethiopian activists. Dmitri Vitaliev is the group's co-founder and director and he's with us from Montreal. Hello.

DMITRI VITALIEV: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: What are your thoughts after you hear what the Ethiopian government was up to with Cyberbit?

DMITRI VITALIEV: Well I guess unfortunately it's more of the same. Being in this industry you get to come across to stories quite often. It is quite worrying about the prevalence of this offensive security technology, not only targeting activists but you know really being able - the scope is to be able to target any person on the Internet. The sophistication of these tools compared to the type of defences that normal people usually bring to bear in the computer, or perhaps slack of these defences, means that everybody is exposed and everybody can become a victim of this type of activity.

AMT: Would you say that Ethiopia is a major player in online surveillance today or in a normal player that just happened to get caught?

DMITRI VITALIEV: Ethiopia has been known for the last decade I guess of severely restricting citizens access to the Internet of monitoring surveilling and persecuting bloggers in their own country and going after diaspora. And again I guess they are an active player. Not sure if I will call them a prominent player but maybe just being active is enough.

AMT: So what have you seen? What have they been doing with activists both in and outside the country?

DMITRI VITALIEV: Well specifically you know we have more of these malware threats whereby a person's e-mail account gets hacked, or a person's computer gets planted with malware and then they are able to follow their video camera, record everything that is being said around the phone or around the computer. More specifically in Ethiopia itself you know bloggers who publish either pseudonymously or using their own name often face repercussions soon after the publications.

AMT: So how do you help activists in the diaspora protect themselves?

DMITRI VITALIEV: Well it's about several things really. First of all there needs to be an awareness, an awareness of the existing digital threats that they're facing and the awareness of tools and resources that they can bring to bear to minimize these risks. We try to first and foremost talk about changing behavior. To make them feel empowered that you know these choices that they make on a computer or in their information management cycle you know are not so difficult to change, and when changed increase the level of defences, increase the level of security by several factors. We teach them how to use more secured email and online services for example. We teach them how to clean their computers from viruses, how to protect their computers from infection. We teach them how to secure that data when they're travelling let's say, how to encrypt dates on the computer or on their flashcards, how to take digital evidence properly and how to be able to destroy it efficiently as well because that is also important.

AMT: And when you have an autocratic government that is tracking someone say in Canada, who's like outside of that government's country but in Canada, do they ever face physical threats? Are they tracked so that people can find where they are? They are ever visited, anything like that happening?

DMITRI VITALIEV: Yes I do recall - I can't remember the names right away. It happened in the UK whereby an online campaign against a particular news media, I think it was also diaspora news media, was followed soon after when the online campaign was unsuccessful. The offence of security kind of campaign was unsuccessful. There were several visits being made to the addresses of the news desk and to the personal addresses of the journalists who were working there.

AMT: So this is the kind of thing that Canadian security needs to keep an eye on right, government security?

DMITRI VITALIEV: Yes I mean that is an interesting question. Should this kind of action be solely at the discretion of various government security forces or should citizens themselves actually start to care and start to take precautions to protect themselves online? I mean it's an interesting question because if we do kind of leave this to one side, if you say that this is the [unintelligible] the government, they will protect me as a citizen. I think we've seen time and time again that the problem - the target is too big really for any one governmental body to look up to everybody in the country. I think the problem is too big and the responsibility should really rely on ourselves to (A) start to care about the probe and to (B) feel empowered that we can actually do something about it, and then to have access to the necessary educational resources and tools and services in order to be able to minimize threat. And these resources are freely available. We've spent you know the last 10 years and a lot of taxpayers money coming up with all sorts of educational resources tailored at various models of learning. We have created and translated a lot of software and a lot of online services to empower citizens all over the Internet to regain their privacy, to not become a victim of this type of - whether targeted orsimply random [unintelligible] activity on the internet.

AMT: Well Dmitri Vitaliev it's good to have your perspective on this. Thank you.

DMITRI VITALIEV: Thank you.

DMITRI VITALIEV: Dmitry Vitaliev is the co-founder and director of Equality, a Montreal based non-profit organization that provides support, training and digital protection for journalists, activists and civil society workers worldwide. He joined us from Montreal. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q, Canadian comic Katherine Ryan joins Tom Power. She's presenting a special edition of This Hour has 22 Minutes, all about how Canada is seen around the world. Finally today in our discussion about self-improvement, earlier in the program, we heard a clip from Norman Vincent Peale one of the pioneers of self-help. You may have heard of him or read one of his classic books but did you know that his philosophy has been a major influence on Donald Trump? We are going to leave you with Gwenda Blair a biographer of the Trump family describing their relationship with Norman Vincent Peale. This is from a video produced by Business Insider. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

His family was very influenced by a minister named Norman Vincent Peale who wrote a book called The Power of Positive Thinking. The teachings of Norman Vincent Peale had a great deal of influence on the Trump family. Fred Trump and his wife Mary began attending the church where Norman Vincent Peale was a minister in Manhattan. And Donald and his two sisters were married in that church. The two parents funerals were held in that church and the Power of Positive Thinking, as the title suggests, is about how thinking positively about your accomplishments and yourself can pretty much enable you to do anything and get anywhere. And there's a list of guidelines in the first chapter, 10 guidelines to success. And it's really kind of theology and business mixed together and saying it's kind of God's plan for you to be successful and go for it. The first one says essentially visualize an image of yourself as successful and then this is the quote "stamp it indelibly on your mind and never let it go, and never think of yourself as failing. Don't let the idea of failure enter your mind." This is what Donald Trump does. Everything is a success. That's it.

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