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The Current Transcript for May 16, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Users deserve to know whether the trending topics on Facebook really are trending or whether it’s just something that some social justice warrior in San Francisco wants you to believe is popular. It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to be honest about it.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It counts one billion users a day. 60 per cent of millennials get their political information from it. Enough traffic that Facebook is now considered the biggest news distributor on the planet with all the influence that implies. So allegations that it suppresses topics of interest to conservatives have created a firestorm, even getting the US Senate Commerce Committee involved. Should Facebook's unprecedented domination force new regulations and transparency? We've got that debate in an hour. Also today, we first introduced you to a man who calls himself Captain about a year ago. He was homeless. He'd had a few run-ins with the law. He was optimistic.

SOUNDCLIP

Because I know that eventually I will get out of this. I’ve been down before, rock bottom, and I’ve always bounced back.

AMT: This time that may be too much to expect by an oversight. A man who arrived in Canada at age nine never got citizenship. Now his relatively minor crimes have triggered a deportation order. He is not alone. Other unlikely people with a criminal record face the same fate. His story in half an hour. And just last week the British Prime Minister was caught in an aside to the Queen complaining of corrupt Leaders at his Anti-Corruption Summit.

SOUNDCLIP

We’ve got the leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain. Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world.

AMT: Well, actually, Mr. Cameron got it wrong. Nigeria does not make the top 10 of corrupt countries, which brings us to our lead today. There are many corrupt governments stealing from their own people. Should there be an International Anti-Corruption Court? We’re asking. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Can an international court stamp out government corruption?

Guests: Robert Rotberg, Milos Barutciski

SOUNDCLIP

TRANSLATOR: Dilma Rousseff has committed a crime of financial responsibility. We want her to step down. Dilma out! Workers Party out!

[crowd chanting]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, that’s a translation of Brazilian protesters who took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro last Thursday, calling for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. They got their wish. Brazil's Senate voted to impeach the president, who was immediately suspended. Ms. Rousseff came under political fire for allegedly fudging government accounting numbers to hide the scope of Brazil's deficit during her re-election campaign in 2014. It’s hardly the beginning of Brazil’s problems. The country is still reeling from a 5.3 billion-dollar corruption scandal involving a massive kick-back scheme with the state-run oil company Petrobras that occurred under the watch of her predecessor Lula da Silva. She was chair of Petrobras, though she has now been accused of wrong doing. Dollar for dollar, the Petrobras scandal is believed to be the largest corruption scandal ever in a democratic country. So, while Ms. Rousseff has been suspended in Brazil, there are world leaders and bureaucrats holding office in other countries who continue to empty public coffers with seeming impunity. The World Bank estimates that corruption costs the global economy one trillion dollars every year. Last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron hosted an anti-corruption summit in London, which raised the idea of establishing an International Anti-Corruption Court. So today, we’re asking what role a court could play in stamping out corruption. Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution at Harvard University's School of Government. He’s in Lexington, Massachusetts. Hello.

ROBERT ROTBERG: Hello.

AMT: Well, first of all, let's just look at the Brazilian example. Is Dilma Rousseff accused of taking money to enrich herself?

ROBERT ROTBERG: No, she's not personally accused of that. She's accused of manipulating finances using bank loans to keep her government in office.

AMT: Well, that brings us to the whole issue of how you define corruption.

ROBERT ROTBERG: Well, corruption is the use by a government official or government person or government-connected person to enrich themselves rather than serve the public will.

AMT: And so would she be corrupt under those?

ROBERT ROTBERG: No, no. No and she’s not being accused of corruption. That's was interesting. She's being accused of fiddling with government finances.

AMT: Now, the Petrobras scandal reportedly totalled 5.3 billion dollars. How unusual was that scandal?

ROBERT ROTBERG: That's the largest that we know about at the moment. It's certainly huge and 5.3 billion is probably an underestimate of what's been going on and it was quite clear that many Brazilian politicians, probably 60 or 70, had their hands deeply in the Petrobras till, both to support their various political parties, including Dilma Rousseff’s own. She was chair of the Petrobras during this period. But none of the money that was stolen from Petrobras reached her personally.

AMT: And some of the money went to individuals who weren't elected as well, did it not?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Oh, just many - the speaker of the lower house, many senators, conceivably the interim president who's replaced her, conceivably the former president of Brazil, Lula Da Silva. It’s quite messy and it touches every part of Brazilian society.

AMT: But that went to trial, didn't it? I mean, the reason we know about it is because it all came out.

ROBERT ROTBERG: Well, it's coming out. It hasn't all come out yet. Lots of pieces have come out. But the actual full reach will have to be developed over the next year, I would say.

AMT: So, give us some context. When you look at that, what else is going on in the world in terms of corrupt governments?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Well, Cameron, as you said, suggested that Afghanistan and Nigeria are fantastically corrupt. That again is probably an underestimate. Even under the new president Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, every part of Nigeria that is still corrupt with funds stolen from oil revenues largely. And in a place like Afghanistan, which is also correctly fantastically corrupt, there is corruption at every level based largely on the opium proceeds that pulse through the country.

AMT: And yet, if you look at Transparency International, listen, Nigeria even make the top ten.

ROBERT ROTBERG: Well, the top ten-- The top 20 is pretty good. I think it made the top 20. And Transparency International is only perceptions of corruption, so we don't really know the extent of corrupt dealings in country by country. But the last year, Transparency International did it, they did 168 countries, down from 174 the year before. And so if you make the bottom 20 of that list or bottom 30, you’re still not very good.

AMT: And so the British prime minister did host an invitation only anti-corruption summit last week. There's talk of an international anti-corruption court. How would that work?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Well, the anti-corruption court would punish, attempt to punish, would investigate and try and then it then punish people like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who's wildly corrupt, whose country has no means of bringing him to court. See, Brazil functions and Brazil can bring people to justice. But in a place like Zimbabwe or Chad or lots of other countries, Nigeria, the courts are mostly under control of corrupt leadership, so it's very difficult to have local people bring their own corrupt leaders to court and to justice. So the international anti-corruption court would take over under a UN umbrella when cases were referred to it from individual countries.

AMT: Kind of like the International Criminal Court works now.

ROBERT ROTBERG: Yes, except the International Criminal Court has not worked as well as we had hoped it would. So, the idea would be that the International Anti-Corruption Court would have tighter standards, different ways of bringing people to justice, and, therefore, work more effectively than the International Criminal Court. The International Criminal Court has still not been able to bring President Bashir of Sudan before its body and it had to drop the prosecutions of the President of Kenya, the Vice President of Kenya because witnesses were traduced, presumably threatened heavily within Kenya.

AMT: Okay. Well, Robert Rotberg, I've got someone else here listening in. Milos Barutciski is a partner and co-head of the international trade division in the Toronto office from Bennett Jones. In his legal practice he has represented clients who have been facing demands from corrupt officials in countries where they are trying to do business. And Milos Barutciski joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

MILOS BARUTCISKI: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: So, what do you think about calls for an international anti-corruption court?

MILOS BARUTCISKI: Well, I think it's more aspirational. I think it's a very positive objective. But I probably think it's actually going to be even more difficult to implement than the International Criminal Court was for a couple of fairly simple reasons. The International Criminal Court was there to enforce the laws against war crimes. And there's probably more consensus over laws against war crimes than there is over corruption. I mean, the simple brown envelope of cash handed over in exchange for a favour everybody understands and virtually every country has laws against it. The problem is that the people who get the envelopes are the people who enforce those laws. So, it's a real challenge to get those countries to agree to not just the definition of corruption, because it's not, as I say, it's less the brown envelopes - I'm not saying that doesn't happen. Of course that happens. The wire transfers to offshore bank accounts and so forth. That does happen. The real kinds of corruption or the forum where it takes place is in the interface between public and private. So it's the handing out of public contracts of resource concessions, government procurement, permits and licensing, that kind of stuff that creates opportunities and builds relationships between the private sector and the public sector that sometimes are not—Well, they can be fundamentally illegal. So the payments and the rewards may come much later. And that's kind of difficult to root out. As well as the people who are in charge, the politicians have a vested interest in preventing it. So to go back to the International Criminal Court analogy, you have major players, like the United States, that refuse to be a part of it. Is the US going to turn to having its officials prosecuted by an international court on poorly defined principles of corruption? I'm not so sure. Not just the US, many countries.

AMT: Just so that I understand, give us an idea of what your clients face. Can you actually give me an idea of how a client - what kind of corruption they face?

MILOS BARUTCISKI: I call it a shakedown. And I'm not talking about companies that go out there with a business model of saying, okay, we need permission to build a mine, or drill, and pumping oil or gas out of the ground, so we're going to pay somebody. Those aren't the clients I deal with. The clients I deal with tend to be the clients that have compliance policies or the clients that want to do it right and are shaken down. So the issue is gateways. At some point in almost any interaction between government and the private sector, there's a gating function. Whether you need a permit, you need a license, you need approval, you need a government contract. And that’s where the gatekeepers--

AMT: Right. And who’s at the gate? Is it an elected official or is it a bureaucrat?

MILOS BARUTCISKI: Could be both. They could be either or both.

AMT: And so, Robert Rotberg, how would you get to that?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Oh, I think you would use a forensic means to do that. If a company went into a small country, like Lesotho, and tried to get contracts to build water treatment plants or help construct a dam, they would presumably need to get permits and they'd have to pay someone in the corrupt countries to get those permits. And there would be traces, quite easy traces of those contract manoeuvrings. People would have suddenly banked large amounts of money to personal bank accounts. Or they would have shipped, as Mugabe does, ship funds overseas to a banking jurisdiction, like the British Virgin Islands. So, you could trace that money. It's difficult, but there would certainly lots of methods to do that.

AMT: But how would you get countries to sign on?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Ah, well, that's the same thing as the International Criminal Court.

AMT: Exactly.

ROBERT ROTBERG: There are countries that have not signed the Rome Statute. And there would be many countries that wouldn’t sign the international anti-corruption court statute, but you get to those countries, as the International Criminal Court has done, through the Security Council. So the Security Council would direct this new anti-corruption court to pursue question why.

AMT: But how would you get around the criticism that this is the developed world persecuting the developing world? That this is very colonial?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Yes. That that's certainly a problem the International Criminal Court has faced. But given the ability to prosecute the bribers as well as the bribees you would ensnare lots of developed country companies who are the bribers. So, it might be easier to have cases before the international anti-corruption court seen even-handed than it has been with the International Criminal Court.

AMT: My guest in our Toronto studio is shaking his head. What?

MILOS BARUTCISKI: I think there's a fundamental disconnect here. The laws are enforcement against the bribers we already have. That was the objective of the OECD convention against bribery. It was the objective of the United Nations convention against bribery. It’s called the supply side strategy, which we have. Now, Canada, as a result of those conventions, OECD in ’97 and the United Nations in 2007, Canada now has laws to prosecute bribery bought for foreign officials by Canadian companies, as do most countries in the world now. In 1997, there was only one country that had laws like that and that was the US with the FCPA. So what we've seen is gradual increasing enforcement. Even Canada has now prosecuted three companies, one individual has gone to jail, and so forth. The UK has ramped up from a very far back to being a fairly active prosecutor. Germany was one of the first and so forth. So we have that. That is not what the international anti-corruption court would be about. The international anti-corruption court would get at the demand side. It’s to get at the officials. So while I agree with much of what professor Rotberg is saying, that we need a mechanism to go after the impunity of elected or appointed officials to steal from their governments and shake down business. At the same time, what's missing is the both the will and the mechanisms to do it and I don't think this kind of court would do the trick. It would face exactly the same challenges and worse that the ICC does. There may be some interim steps that we should be thinking about. And various people have been calling for them. They’re short term. I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue an ICC or an international anti-corruption court, but things like a reporting mechanism that would allow both companies and civil society, citizens to report to high level corruption to a neutral international third party. Today, who do you report it to? The corrupt police in the country? Or foreign government? Neither are really in a position to do anything about it, because the corrupt police at home are in the pockets of the government.

AMT: But if you report it, what is done about it?

MILOS BARUTCISKI: Well, that’s where the shaming issue starts coming in. We talked about, for example, the impunity. Even at the international criminal court, it's not just the United States and countries that have refused to sign. Countries that have signed, like South Africa-- You know, Professor Rotberg mentioned President Bashir of Sudan. He was in South Africa. A court issued a subpoena for his arrest and the government allowed him to leave. So even in that instance, that's a signatory to the ICC, the criminal court. Now, I can't imagine that it would be any easier. In fact, when politicians have a personal vested interest I think it would be even more difficult to get the kind of—

AMT: Well, and you talk about shaming, but Mr. Mugabe is a good example. He's not easily shamed.

MILOS BARUTCISKI: No, he's not easily shamed, but his economy is also collapsing. South Africa itself changed from the apartheid regime to Nelson Mandela when governments put increasing pressure it was really-- The Canadian government under former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who essentially cajoled Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan into finally coming on board and sanctioning. That's the kind of thing that works.

AMT: Robert Rotberg, what do you think?

ROBERT ROTBERG: Oh, I think, except for the last point, which isn’t accurate, the rest of it I agree with almost completely. There’s going to be enormous problems getting the judges of international anti-corruption court to have jurisdiction in countries which don’t want their corrupt leaders chased. But since civil society in every country and citizens everywhere dislike the yoke of corruption and fight back, if they can, against impunity, I think the international anti-corruption court will have widespread appeal and, therefore, your other guest suggests that it will enable citizens to complain somewhere and send instances and reports. That is true and that will be a very good function of an international anti-corruption court. I think it will also-- Because corruption has many more tentacles than the war crimes, the international anti-corruption court may be able to go to and stop the places where corrupt leaders are sending their funds. So, we’ll be able to use the banking network to oppose corruption effectively.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you, both of you, for this discussion today. I’ve been speaking with Robert Rotberg. He’s the founding director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution at Harvard University's School of Government. He joined us from Lexington, Massachusetts. Milos Barutciski is a partner and the co-head of the international trade division of the Calgary law firm Bennett Jones. He’s in the Toronto office. Let us know what you think. You can email us. We are at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Go to our Contact link. You can tweet us. We’re @thecurrentCBC. And stay with us. We're following up on the life of a homeless man called Captain who dreamed of one day turning his life around. You met him on this program last season. Today, he's facing deportation. Stay with us. I'm an Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, and online at cbc.ca/thecurrent.

Back To Top »

'My life is here': Homeless man living in Canada for 48 years faces deportation

Guests: The Captain, Lorne Waldman, Julie Taub

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

[Music: theme]

AMT: Still to come, a controversy over trending topics on Facebook reveals the social media monolith’s growing influence on the news. But first, catching up with Captain.

SOUNDCLIP

CAPTAIN: During the day you're just putting in the hours, especially in the cold. So you're sitting in the library or even on the TTC, ride it back and forth just to kill the time until the hostel opens. The worst thing is walking around and you have no, you like to go point A to point B, but you don't have any point B, you're just walking.

AMT: What do you think when you're like that?

CAPTAIN: It's a bad, bad feeling. You have no plan, right. You just feel really down.

AMT: Well, that's an excerpt from my conversation with a man who calls himself Captain and we first met him last year when he shared with us what it's like to live on the streets. Captain's addictions had cost him his work and his family and he had run-ins with the law as well. He told us how he came to be homeless after losing his place in a rooming house in Toronto.

SOUNDCLIP

CAPTAIN: It's been two years since I had a place.

AMT: So two years. What was going on two years ago then? You had a place?

CAPTAIN: I had a place, yeah. I got in trouble with the police. And I did a couple of months in jail. I lost my place when I got out. It was gone. And to get a new place was very, very hard. I still haven't got a place. I’ve got a housing worker, everything.

AMT: Do you have any family?

CAPTAIN: I've got lots of family but they don't even know I'm homeless.

AMT: Yeah. That's why you call yourself Captain? You don't want them to know?

CAPTAIN: That's right.

AMT: Why?

CAPTAIN: Because I'm too proud. And they're all successful. I’d be a big embarrassment. Because I know eventually I will get out of this. I've been down before, rock bottom, and I've always bounced back.

AMT: Well, Captain has not bounced back. When we checked in with him, we found out that he's now facing deportation. Although he has lived in Canada most of his life he is not a Canadian citizen. And those months he mentioned that he spent in jail, that was eight months, enough to get you deported if you are not a Canadian citizen. In 2013, the then Harper government changed the immigration law with Bill C-43, its so-called faster removal of foreign criminals act, which means a non-citizen can be deported after serving a six-month sentence for a crime without the right to appeal. We’ll discuss the law, but first, Captain is back with me. Hello.

CAPTAIN: Hi. How are you?

AMT: I'm wondering how you doing? Where are you living now?

CAPTAIN: I'm staying with a friend. She's got a motel room. She had an accident, the insurance is paying for it and I'm with her.

AMT: Okay. But you don't have a place of your own?

CAPTAIN: No.

AMT: How did you find out that you face deportation?

CAPTAIN: I was sitting at LAMP. That's where I hang out. And a friend came up behind me and said, here. This is for you. Right out of the blue.

AMT: And LAMP is the Etobicoke agency in Toronto that’s helping you.

CAPTAIN: Right.

AMT: And they just handed you a letter?

CAPTAIN: He handed it to me. It came to his address, someplace I never lived before. And apparently before that the police were looking for me. I didn't know why. And maybe that was it. They were going to present me with the order.

AMT: And so what have you been thinking since you found out? How have you been?

CAPTAIN: Well, I'm on edge. I don't know what's going to happen, right. I’d like it over one way or the other.

AMT: So they told you that you face deportation. Did they give you a date? Did they tell you—Like, what did the letter say?

CAPTAIN: I had to show up for a hearing, which I did. And they just said, are these facts correct? Did you do the eight months? I said, yes. And they said, okay. You’re getting deported.

AMT: What happened that landed you in jail for those eight months?

CAPTAIN: It was a break and enter, which I broke into my own place. It was a cold night. I had a restraining order from another tenant there. And I even got friends of mine to go back to get my things and she wouldn't let me get my stuff back.

AMT: And you were trying to get into this place, why? Because your stuff was there?

CAPTAIN: Everything was there. Everything.

AMT: In retrospect, what should you have done instead?

CAPTAIN: I should have went to the police and got them to, you know. But one night when it was cold outside, it was freezing, and I was a little drunk, and I broke the little window in my room and climbed in and went to bed.

AMT: And the police file says you were supposed to stay away from a woman in the building?

CAPTAIN: Right.

AMT: Did you threaten or harm her?

CAPTAIN: No. No. I pleaded it out. When I went to court I just wanted to get it over with, right. It was my word against hers and she already previously said I threatened her. She said, I should have you wacked. Even my probation officer said, like, it's not part of my vocabulary.

AMT: Oh, that was the accusation, that you said that.

CAPTAIN: That was the accusation. I pleaded guilty to that too because it was her word against me, so.

AMT: Okay. And so when you got to jail, that was eight months because of a plea.

CAPTAIN: Right.

AMT: Had you known-- Did you know about that six-month or more rule?

CAPTAIN: No.

AMT: If you had known, would you have made that plea?

CAPTAIN: No, I wouldn’t have.

AMT: Did your lawyer know?

CAPTAIN: He said to me, well, what the crown said they wanted nine months. And he came to me and says, oh, I’ve got good news for you. I got it dropped to eight months. I was in shock. But I just wanted to get it over with. You know, do my time and that’s it.

AMT: Now, you're not a Canadian citizen?

CAPTAIN: No.

AMT: But when did you come to the country?

CAPTAIN: I came here in 1968.

AMT: How old were you?

CAPTAIN: I was nine years old

AMT: Okay. Nine years old. From where?

CAPTAIN: From Ireland. Belfast.

AMT: Why did you never become a citizen?

CAPTAIN: I just never—I was young and I guess my parents just never—Eventually, everybody my family did become citizens. But by that time I had a criminal record and I couldn't become one.

AMT: Okay. And so if this deportation goes through, where will you go?

CAPTAIN: Well, Dublin. I’m thinking of Dublin, right.

AMT: Okay. But they'll send you to Ireland, in other words?

CAPTAIN: Yeah.

AMT: Okay. Do you have family there? Do you have any connections?

CAPTAIN: No. Well, family, but I haven’t seen them in years.

AMT: You don’t stay in touch with them?

CAPTAIN: No.

AMT: Now, You have faced other charges over the years for theft. 2005, 2004. You’ve had suspended sentences with probation. You know, if you look at that, you would be called a repeat offender. Some people would say, time to go. How would you respond to that?

CAPTAIN: Well, if you look at it was over a period of 40 years, and, you know, there's been big gaps there, seven or eight years, nothing, right. So, and nothing. No violence. Even when I did my eight months I worked in the kitchen.

AMT: With knives.

CAPTAIN: With knives around, right. Yeah. So I was no security risk.

AMT: So you've never been a violent offender?

CAPTAIN: No. No.

AMT: So, what would happen if you were sent to Ireland? What would you do? Like, how do you see that? What do you think about?

CAPTAIN: I don’t know. Get off the plane. I don’ t know the procedure, you know. I don’t know. Get off the plane and…

AMT: And go where?

CAPTAIN: If they have a Salvation Army there, that’s where I’m going to go, right. I’ve got to start from scratch.

AMT: So, the law says that people with criminal records who are not Canadians con't necessarily have the right to stay in the country?

CAPTAIN: Right.

AMT: Do you think that's fair?

CAPTAIN: It is fair to an extent. Like, before it was two years less a day. If you’ve got two years less a day, that was a serious offence, right. But now it's six months. You can get six months for—Like, me, it was my--The reason they asked for the eight months because it was like my third, because I did a couple when I was younger, right. Even when the police came they didn’t even handcuff me. They said I went and got a sandwich, went back into my room.

AMT: Your deportation file actually says that, yes, you broke an exterior window, which you say you did.

CAPTAIN: Right.

AMT: And you climbed in the window.

CAPTAIN: Yeah.

AMT: You slashed a feather bed?

CAPTAIN: Well, I don't know about that. I don’t remember that.

AMT: Okay. And then you took a frozen pizza and meat sauce from the freezer and you took it to your room.

CAPTAIN: Right. Yeah, I don't remember that.

AMT: That’s your deportation order.

CAPTAIN: That’s my—Yeah. That’s why I’m getting deported.

AMT: You do have a lawyer who's working with you now.

CAPTAIN: Yes, I do.

AMT: Who is actually appealing your sentence.

CAPTAIN: Yeah. Even though I served my sentence, they can appeal it.

AMT: So what kind of stress are you feeling because of all of this?

CAPTAIN: It's like I've kind of given up. Like, I really just want to get it over with, one way or the other, right.

AMT: But you don't want to go there?

CAPTAIN: No. My life is here, right. I've been here 47 and a half years, almost 48 years, right. My girlfriend’s here. My son's here. My family's here. My parents are buried here. You know.

AMT: Thanks for talking to me.

CAPTAIN: Okay, thank you.

AMT: Well, that is The Captain. He is homeless. He lives in Toronto. You can hear my first conversation with him and a woman named Cheryl about living on the streets. That is on our site, cbc.ca/thecurrent. As I mentioned, he faces deportation due to a 2013 change to the Immigration Act. Immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman has been raising concerns about the so-called Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act since it was first enacted. He joins me in Toronto. Hello.

LORNE WALDMAN: Hello.

AMT: What do you think of the story you just heard?

LORNE WALDMAN: Well, it's typical of so many others that I've seen. People have been in Canada their whole lives are being told they have to leave uprooted from all of their close connections, their families, for criminal convictions for which they've served their time. And I think it's reprehensible that as a state we're removing from Canada people who’ve lived their whole lives here just because they weren't born here or didn't bother getting citizenship. I mean, they're products of Canada and they have a right to live in Canada.

AMT: What does the law actually say about a non-citizen who commits a crime?

LORNE WALDMAN: If you're a permanent resident of Canada and you commit a crime that is punishable by ten or more years or for which you get six months or more, you can be ordered deported. Up until the changes in the law, if the sentence was less than two years, you had a right of appeal to the immigration appeal division. And in a case like this where the person spent almost all his life in Canada I think he would have an excellent chance of having the deportation set aside. Jason Kenney introduced reforms in 2013. I think it was, that were widely criticized by most of the immigration bar, although there were some exceptions. And those changed the threshold for a right of appeal to six months. So anyone who got more than six months loses the right of appeal. And so this is now affecting a very significant number of permanent residents, many who have been in Canada all their lives, who have lost the right of appeal.

AMT: Just to clarify then, prior to 2013, it had to be a sentence of two years or more to be deported. What did that two-year sentence signal in a court of law?

LORNE WALDMAN: Well, if you get two years, you’re sentenced to a federal penitentiary. So it that was the threshold. If the sentence was serious enough to be sent to a federal penitentiary, there was a thought you didn't deserve a right of appeal. But if it was less than two years, you did.

AMT: And what was the intent of this legislation, this change?

LORNE WALDMAN: Well, it was said to be enacted in order to allow them to deport criminals more quickly. I'm not sure that it has that effect, but what it has had the effect of is dramatically reducing the number of people who have a right of appeal. And so a lot of people who have been in Canada almost all their lives are now facing deportation for relatively insignificant criminal convictions.

AMT: How common is this kind of deportation decision?

LORNE WALDMAN: I would say there are hundreds of persons in similar situations to The Captain, who've been in Canada for very long periods of time who are who are being deported. I have in my office right now three or four clients in similar situations.

AMT: Are they roughly his age? In their 50s?

LORNE WALDMAN: Yes. 50s, 40s.

AMT: --breaking into his own room, so that he can get his stuff.

JULIE TAUB: Well, there was a restraining order against him from—

AMT: Yes, that's true. That's true. So is that the kind of crime that deserves to be kicked out of the country for?

JULIE TAUB: No, it's not the kind of crime you should be kicked out of the country for. If you look at it as an individual crime and he is not a repeat offender. But on the other hand, that is not the kind of crime you should be getting eight months for.

AMT: What has been your experience in trying to defend people who have committed crimes and have tried to stay in Canada?

JULIE TAUB: Well, before the law was changed I did go to the immigration appeals division with many people, permanent residents, who had committed crimes and who had received sentences over two years and, although, I was successful and my clients had promised and sworn up and down that that's it, they're finished with a life of crime, what I did find, unfortunately, is all but one re-offended. And then they came back to me again and I wouldn't proceed with their appeals anymore, because I was so, so disappointed.

AMT: So and this has shaped how you believe this, that government needs to be tougher?

JULIE TAUB: Well, the government needs to be tougher, but there has to be some flexibility, such as in the case of The Captain, especially when it's applied retroactively because, frankly, eight months for this type of break and entry is an excessive, excessive sentence. The Captain, I disagree with his eight-month sentence. I really disagree with his eight-month sentence. But if you look at it objectively, going back to Ireland, to the Salvation Army is not that much different of how he’s living here in Canada now. And he speaks English and they speak English there and he would receive the same services that he receives here.

AMT: And so, in your mind, that's okay then?

JULIE TAUB: Well, perhaps, in my mind I would like to see this case reviewed and I'm glad it's being appealed, but I think it should be appealed in the criminal appeal, because his sentence should be reduced retroactively and they have done it.

AMT: We did ask to speak with John McCallum, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, about this. He was not available, but we do know the Liberal government is reviewing many of the previous government's policies, specifically when it comes to tough on crime legislation. What are you watching for?

JULIE TAUB: Frankly, I just believe that the Liberal government is going to undo every reform and change that was brought into immigration by the last government.

AMT: And what are your concerns about that?

JULIE TAUB: Well, the concerns will be those cases that I raised. I have over a dozen here of the most egregious examples, which I did not share with you, and I think we'll be back to that, where serious criminals will be able to delay their deportations for years on end. But I hope somewhere along the line somebody takes into consideration the best interest of Canada and our safety and our security.

AMT: Okay. Julie Taub, thank you for your time.

JULIE TAUB: Thank you.

AMT: Julie Taub is an immigration lawyer. She joined us from Ottawa. If you have thoughts on what you're hearing, you can reach us by going to the web site, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. You can find us on Facebook or on Twitter. We are @thecurrentCBC. Let us know what you think about this deportation practice. Is it too harsh? You can get a hold of us. If you’re joining us partway through, go to the web site, cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can download the podcast or listen right there. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, and online at cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Why it matters that Facebook decides what 1.5 billion see every day

Guests: Zeynep Tufecki, Issie Lapowsky, Navneet Alang

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. Chances are good that as you're listening to this right now, you may be scrolling through your Facebook feed, posting about your morning workout, catching up on your friends' latest pictures, pet videos, monitoring the latest news from activists, and also, seeing what's trending, what stories Facebook has decided to feature as the biggest news of the day. Well, Facebook is now in the midst of a controversy over exactly how the media giant curates the stories you see.

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VOICE 1: Log on folks. An anonymous former Facebook contractor said that he witnessed his colleagues supressing news about popular conservative topics from the website’s trending section.

VOICE 2: …over allegations that the social network giant is biased against reporting Conservative oriented news items. It’s a story that has a lot of people talking.

VOICE 3: In a statement Facebook’s VP Tom Stockey said in part, there are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality.

VOICE 4: There is action from the Senate. We’re hearing from the Chairman of the Commerce Committee on the Senate side, a Republican from South Dakota, he sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking a lot of questions.

AMT: Last week, the tech publication Gizmodo published accounts from anonymous former curators at Facebook, who said the website suppressed conservative news while boosting other news. Facebook has denied the allegations. CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a response on Facebook saying quote “Facebook stands for giving everyone a voice”. End quote. He also said he would invite, quote “Leading Conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” End quote. His statement has done little to calm the critics. A US senator has asked him to appear before Congress to answer questions about how Facebook develops its trending topics. Everyday, a billion people around the world use Facebook. For many it is there main source of news. In fact, according to a study by the Pew Research Centre for Media and Journalism, 60 percent of millenials get their political news from Facebook. Today, as part of our occasional series, Eye On The Media, we're exploring Facebook’s role and responsibility in delivering the news. Zeynep Tufecki is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina. She's in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Issie Lapowsky is a staff writer at WIRED magazine. She's in New York. And with me in our Toronto studio is Navneet Alang, a technology & culture writer. Hi everyone.

GUESTS: Hi.

AMT: Navneet Alang, I'm going to start with you. Why do you think the story is getting so much attention?

NAVENEET: I think, as you mentioned, the extent to which people get their news from Facebook has made it so central in their lives that any sort of whiff of bias or duplicitousness gets people worried because Facebook has almost sort of developed a monopoly on how people get information, or at least it seems to be approaching that.

AMT: Issie Lapowsky, how concerned are you about the allegations that it suppresses the news, or conservative news; that it is biased?

ISSIE LAPOWSKY: I think Facebook still needs to do some investigations there as to whether or not there was active intentional suppression. And that will really come down to talking to its staff and going through the history because what we're really looking at now is a situation where most of us thought that these news stories were surfaced by algorithm. We’ve now learned that there is some element of news judgment involved so it seems unlikely that there was some mass conspiracy to suppress conservative news. But who knows, you know whenever there is human involvement, there could be one bad actor who is doing this or instructing other people to do it. That will come down to Facebook really talking with the staff, and so far there has been no evidence that such a thing has happened, but I'm sure those conversations are ongoing.

AMT: Now we did reach out to Facebook to be part of this conversation. Facebook sent a statement and I'm going to read part of it and I'm quoting here: “trending topics is designed to surface popular conversations no matter where they fall on the political spectrum and our guidelines require the review team members to allow all points of view. We have seen allegations that people did not honour the intent of those guidelines. Although the allegations are anonymous, we take them seriously. We are continuing to investigate whether any violations took place” End quote. Zeynep Tufecki, how has Facebook explained the decision making behind these trending topics?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: Well, I want to say it feels like the wrong controversy. The topic is correct, but both the conservative complaint and Facebook's defense feel hollow to me. The issue is about this tiny portion of the site on the desktop, which is trending topics, it's not where Facebook's control lies, which is the main news feed. And if anything, from the guidelines that have been leaked and Facebook confirmed, it seems all that they were doing is vetting some of the stories to make sure that they were actual real news stories rather than the kind of false news you sometimes you see go viral on Facebook. So, I think the conservative complaint is more like fighting the last war where you complain about liberal media to try to get better coverage. I don't really put much stock in that. On the other hand, Facebook's defence that algorithms is what is surfacing the topics and therefore they're neutral, is actually more worrisome because those algorithms, the idea that algorithms are this neutral, unbiased objective mathematical computational, scientific, this kind of aura is the most dangerous idea facing the 21st century public sphere because algorithmic computational processes in human affairs do not make human affairs more precise. There are all sorts of different, new, novel, and crucial ways; ways that don’t really neatly fill occur in a liberal conservative spectrum, but are very important that are biasing. So I think the topic is very important but the trending topics, it's not where Facebook's power lies. Vetting it so that fake stories don’t get on it, fine with me, but the algorithm being neutral, absolutely not. That’s the kind of thing that I think is really crucial.

AMT: Let's get an explanation. Navneet Alang, can you explain what an algorithm is and how they govern what we see online?

NAVNEET ALANG: It's essentially a set of mathematical formulas designed to make decisions. So an algorithm, the most common algorithm that we came across before Facebook was Google and how you search and so there was a complex set of decisions that that showed which results came at the top of the Google search. So now with Facebook there is a set of algorithms that determine what appears not only in trending topics, but the bigger issue is what appears in your news feed. That is the main section of Facebook that you log into on a day to day basis. What shows up in terms of recency, what is popular, what is most shared, all of that is determined by an algorithm.

AMT: Can they be neutral?

NAVNEET ALANG: Absolutely not. I think that Zeynep is exactly correct. Even if, for example one has an algorithm that is determined by popularity or sharing, that itself is a decision, right? That is, it reflects a particular idea about what people should see and so algorithms are absolutely not neutral. They will always reflect the biases of the people that design the algorithms.

AMT: Issie Lapowsky, Navneet just mentioned the use of algorithms with Google but how common is the use of algorithms outside Facebook?

ISSIE LAPOWSKY: Oh well, algorithms rule Silicon Valley. I mean, everything is decided by algorithms, that's how these companies keep their overhead so low that's sort of the magic, the secret sauce of Silicon Valley, is that they're able to automate so much of this decision making process. But it is absolutely true that those algorithms have had human beings decision making capability baked into them because it's human beings who are building the algorithms. What they also can do is prioritize certain business interests for a company. For instance, if Facebook is very interested in video content because that's a major point of focus now, maybe its algorithms start surfacing more video content. There are so many ways that these algorithms can be skewed and not completely unbiased, but absolutely they're everywhere.

AMT: And how aware do you think people are of them, Issie?

ISSIE LAPOWSKY: I don't think people are aware and it's funny because it's how it's worked for so long, but I think that most people think when they're scrolling through Facebook that they're seeing everything that their friends are posting and that's just really not the case. They're seeing the business that like their pages or, the more likely you are to click on a story about say a presidential candidate, whether it's Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, you're going to start seeing more posts about Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders because Facebook thinks that this is the thing that you like to read. I think this is a whole other issue that we need to talk about, it's not just trending topics as Zeynep said. Facebook is already showing us just a very small sliver of the news on a day to day basis in our news feeds because it's showing us what it thinks we want to read.

AMT: Now Zeynep, you've written about why algorithms matter so much using the example of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Those erupted after an unarmed black teenager named Mike Brown was fatally shot by police. How did the hash tag #ferguson trend on Facebook versus Twitter?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: So that's a great example and it shows a key thing about algorithms. The biases of the people writing them are not directly reflected in them. It's perfectly possible for Facebook's whole management and programmers to be very liberal, but because of the algorithmic biases for the platform to actually be very hospitable to say, a liberal cause. The Ferguson example was a great one. It was a bad one, but it showed what can happen on Facebook. The algorithm gets it signals from the like button or from comments so things that are liked and things that are commented are things that are shared. That's why you have lots of baby pictures, everybody likes them. And that's why it seems that your relatives are constantly fighting over stuff because of their comments, the algorithm surfaces them. So what happened with Ferguson was the news wasn't likeable; it was this difficult conversation about race and policing and there was a young teenager dead in murky circumstances, and a lot of people couldn't comment. What do you say, you don't have all the facts. So, because likes and comments, the way that Facebook funnels its measurement, didn't show up. The story just got buried even though tons of people we're talking about people. People were trying to talk about it on Twitter, there are three million tweets. On my own Facebook feed, if I changed it and took out the algorithm, I would see people talking about it but Facebook would constantly switch me back to the algorithm because it's another myth that these algorithms, because they use math, they're scientific and they're not. They are not based on laws of science or physics, they're just computational that are optimizing for some stuff. And for Facebook, that's just keeping you on the site and keeping the site upbeat. That's why there's a like button and there's no dislike button.

AMT: So what Facebook do about it once that was brought to its attention?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: It turns out one of the things it did was to try to bring some editorial control to the tiny trending topics section that as we discussed, is not very important, so that seems like a response. The other things they did, which I think are positive, they're trying to find ways to surface important but not likable stories. If you linger on a story and stay there for a while, Facebook will now take that as a signal that this is important, but maybe not that likeable so they're trying effectively to improve it, but it's still a computational process that you don't know what's happening. As she said, it can just tweak it and say videos are more important and then your feed is flooded in videos. It's a very opaque and difficult process. I see some things they're trying to do, it's a difficult problem for sure, but it's still true that they control the news for billions of people. It's not just 60 per cent of millennials, in a lot of countries, including my home country where I'm from, mainstream media is fairly censored, Facebook is the public sphere, what they surface and don't is so crucial.

AMT: What is your home country?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: Turkey.

AMT: Okay, if you’re looking at Facebook in Turkey, are you getting American stuff?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: No. What happens is, I still get more positive and upbeat stories than controversial and quarrels. Facebook bias isn't liberal or conservative, it's a bias towards reality, [indecipherable] and things that are liked. That means sometimes very important news gets buried while false stories or baby animals, which I like too, they dominate the feed.

AMT: Navneet, how concerned are you then about the effect that algorithms have over our lives, even outside of Facebook?

NAVNEET ALANG: Quite concerned. I think that the problem of news media leaning towards stories that are likeable, stories that are easily sharable, stories that are easily digestible, is something that predates Facebook. I think the issue is that Facebook and its reliance on algorithms seems to exacerbate that problem. If you determine whether or not a story is seen by how liked it is, how shared it is, and how easily you can respond to it, what's going to happen is, as Zeynep says, that you're going to end up with stories that are relevant to people, but perhaps not keeping them as informed as they might be if it weren't so reliant on this kind of circle of liking and sharing.

AMT: You know, we're talking about Facebook but it doesn't see itself as a media organization. Issie, do you?

ISSIE LAPOWSKY: I think it absolutely is becoming one. It's different from most media organizations because it is working with this vast trove of data on over a billion users around the world, so it has a lot more information to work with then most of us have. But yeah, of course it's becoming a media organization. I think the key will be to really own up to that and to be as transparent as media organizations now have to be. And I think Facebook and all of Silicon Valley, they like to position themselves as platforms. They don't have their hands on the wheel, the tech is doing the work, it's just a platform for you to post your thoughts and photos and everything else. But the more they determine which ones of those thoughts and which ones of those photos we're seeing, the more they're playing the role of the media.

AMT: And Navneet, do you consider them a media organization?

NAVNEET ALANG: I think so, but I think one of the things that characterizes the attention about this, is that there has been a shift in power and influence from publishers to platforms. So Facebook is absolutely a platform, but the line between what constitutes a platform and what constitutes media is starting to blur. One example of this is that Facebook recently, about a year ago, started hosting something called instant articles where instead of an article being hosted on a news publisher's website, it's actually hosted on Facebook's own service. And the reason that Facebook did this was to increase the speed with which the page loads. Sounds like a very small thing, but recently in an interview, Facebook stated that it has increased engagement 30 per cent, and it also has entered into a revenue sharing agreement with publishers. So what that means is, that Facebook is actually hosting content and is making it so that the kind of content that is palatable to users loads more quickly and has and is more accessible. I think that there's a real kind of concern there that Facebook is starting to occupy in the culture the position that media once did.

AMT: And Zeynep, how do you see it?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: It's the most important gatekeeper at the moment so it's definitely media. Not only is it media, it's probably unprecedented in its reach. It has a billion daily users. I don't think there's ever been a gatekeeper that had that kind of power. I want to agree with everyone, it’s not that previous media was neutral and great and wonderful in paradise, but we are now in a new era where this kind of algorithmic gatekeeping is emerging, not only as a main source of news and media, algorithms are invading every other sphere too, from hiring to education, so it’s super important to start talking about how we bring back these concerns of accountability and transparency that we struggled with for so long with old media, and never really got there, but at least we tried. We’ve got to try it with these new filtering systems.

AMT: I was just going to say, the phrase, the name infotainment, was created before Facebook. News media started to blur the lines with other media long before Facebook showed up.

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: Absolutely, and that’s what makes it even more important because now you have these trends that absolutely predate Facebook, but they've totally concentrated--we've got one bottleneck that's controlling a billion, a billion and a half people's daily news consumption, more or less. Plus, they keep saying that we're neutral, we’re just equal, so not only do they have a huge power, they are denying their huge power and that’s what I am trying to argue against, not that traditional media was this angel and we should go back to that, of course not.

AMT: Issie, why do you think they're denying that they're a media organization?

ISSIE LAPOWSKY: Because once you accept that reality, then you have to take certain steps to act like a media organization that's not baked into the culture of Facebook or the culture of Silicon Valley. The culture of Silicon Valley is we're building tech and that's our secret sauce and you're not going to get to know how it works because if you know how it works, not only can you try to do what we do, not that anybody could really replicate Facebook right now, but not only can you try to do what we do but you can try to game the system. I think that the same transparency that's always held true for the media is just not part of the culture at Facebook and I think that they know once that becomes part of the culture, they have to change. They have to change the way they operate and that's not going to be really comfortable for them and remind everybody that news is becoming a major part of what Facebook does, but it is just one part of what Facebook does. Just accepting this new reality, this new identity for themselves, is taking some time but it seems like at least Mark Zuckerberg is coming forward saying we're going to be meeting with conservative leaders soon and he's willing to have these conversations to behave more like media organizations do.

AMT: I just want to ask Issie one more thing-- you're in the midst of a contentious election in the US, how much do you think Facebook can affect the outcome of the US presidential election?

ISSIE LAPOWSKY: Well, I think that's why people are so nervous about this news. It is because we've seen studies come out in the past where Facebook has shown what it can do to manipulate people's emotions by ranking stories in a different order, by showing people more positive news, or more negative news. They released a pretty controversial study a while back that show that they actually could influence people's emotions and the types of posts that they post themselves, so that's scary. We've seen other studies come out about Google that showed that based on how you can manipulate Google search rank, it could influence who people support for president. If you believe that the news you see is what informs your decision making, whether it's about the president or anything else, then yes, this is a really important role that Facebook is playing. I think that is why everyone from the Senate Commerce Committee is getting so nervous about the fact that if Facebook is manipulating that, this is sort of a crisis for conservatism but I think that that might be a little bit of an overreaction, but I understand the concern.

AMT: Zeynep, do you want to jump in?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: Yes. While it's absolutely true Facebook could influence the voter turnout, they published a research piece on that that shows they can and they could influence the election like Google can. But I think it's absolutely not true that Facebook is not hospitable to Conservatives, I think it's the opposite. Donald Trump does better on Facebook because his quarrelsome posts are designed almost to cater to the algorithm. So, when we think about Facebook and algorithms we need to stop fighting the last wars where there was liberal news media and therefore liberal slant, that kind of approach. The Conservative backlash is again fighting less or they just want to sort of get Facebook to feel bad and maybe change a little bit on the trending topics, but the algorithm absolutely does not lean Liberal; it's more like upbeat, or quarrelsome, or in some places, for example in Burma, Myanmar, Facebook has been central to ethnic cleansing efforts and really ferocious hate speech against the minorities there. The idea that it's going to be a liberal biased place because Silicon Valley is liberal, is a misunderstanding of how our algorithms are biased. It doesn't work the way news media works. Bias is there, it’s different.

AMT: Navneet, what responsibility do you think Facebook has to explain how it works to give its users what it is really up to?

NAVNEET ALANG: At the very least, the one thing that they could aim for is transparency. One can say what one wants to about traditional media, but at the end of the day they still have to explain how a story was gathered, which particular journalist did so, what was the editorial judgment involved? The trouble with Facebook is that it seems to act like a media organization while at the same time it resists the responsibility that comes with it. Without that transparency, without knowing exactly how Facebook is determining what we see in the news feed, it's very difficult to have faith that it is living up to its mission of being the representative of the public sphere or a neutral arbiter in determining what news we see.

AMT: We’re almost out of time, but Zeynep, Facebook aside, what questions you think we need to confront then about the way algorithms affect our everyday online experiences and beyond the online?

ZEYNEP TUFECKI: Well, the news organizations have had things like ombudsmen or public editors. We need to develop the 21st century versions for these for algorithms, not just for Facebook. It's not going to work the same way because if even they gave us the whole code, it wouldn't really help us understand. There need to be new methods, and there are new methods, it just starts with accepting that responsibility in that role and dropping this pretense that if it uses math and computation, it is somehow magically neutral, it's not.

AMT: Okay, and Navneet, are there ways we can make sure we get a broader range of stories and perspectives?

NAVNEET ALANG: I don't think that there's a way in forcing that, no. One of the reasons is that Facebook is the product of network effects, you can't just now introduce a new social network and hope that a billion more people will jump on to that one. I think that there is one option, is something like what happened with the Senate Commerce Committee in the US, that there is some kind of, maybe not state intervention, but some kind of call to account from the government.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there, thank you all of you for being part of this discussion.

GUESTS: Thank you.

AMT: I've been speaking with Zeynep Tufecki, an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina. She's in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Issie Lapowsky is a staff writer at WIRED magazine. She's in New York. And in Toronto with me is Navneet Alang, a technology & culture writer. Well, we want to hear what you think. How do you see Facebook's role in the media, what responsibility does it have to behave like a journalistic organization or to follow journalistic principles and be more transparent about its editorial choices? Tweet us we're @thecurrentcbc, post on the story on our Facebook page or email us through the website by clicking on the contact link at cbc.ca/thecurrent. That is today's edition of The Current. We’ve been speaking about Facebook and its role as a media curator, it’s no wonder so many people give in to Facebook as a primary source of news, seeing how effective the social media platform has been at getting us to share the most intimate details of our lives with them. That type of sharing was satirized by The Onion so we're going to leave you with that. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Congress today reauthorized funding for Facebook, the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA. According to the Department of Homeland Security reports, Facebook has replaced almost every other CIA information gathering program since it was launched in 2004.

VOICE 2: After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they lived, their religious and political views, and alphabetized list of all their friends personal email addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA.

VOICE 1: Much of the credit belongs to CIA agent, Mark Zuckerberg who runs the day to day Facebook operations for the agency. The decorated agent code name The Overlord, was recently awarded the prestigious medal of intelligence commendation for his work with the Facebook program which he has called, quote, “The single most powerful tool for population control ever created”. Among the biggest successes of the Facebook program is operation Farmville which the CIA credits with pacifying as many as 85 million people after unemployment rates rose dramatically. Other features, such as the suggested friends window had been instrumental in allowing government agents to infiltrate deeper into the friend networks of suspected dissidents.

[Music: Extro]

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May 16, 2016 full episode transcript

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