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The Current Transcript for February 13, 2017

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I know that my responsibility and my job as prime minister of Canada is to have a constructive working relationship with whomever happens to run the United States and that’s exactly what we’re focusing on doing.

LAURA LYNCH: And today is the first real test of Prime Minister Trudeau’s vow to make things work with US President Donald Trump as the two meet at the White House. Based on Trump’s interactions with other world leaders, it’s not certain things will go smoothly, but Ottawa seems to be doing everything it can to make this a positive first face-to-face encounter. We will dig into the details coming up. After that—

SOUNDCLIP

There’s a lot of death here, which is a sad, sad thing. But hey, if we can get some of them out, it’s got to be a good thing.

LL: The sight is staggering—hundreds of whales lying dead on a beach in New Zealand, even as hundreds of volunteers struggle to save others from the same fate. One of the biggest mass strandings in the country's history has us asking about why these whales—pilot whales in this case—would beach themselves. It's a mystery scientists have yet to solve. And then—

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The password is pottery.

[Sound: Ding]

VOICE 2: Ten points, Liz.

VOICE 3: Ceramics. Pottery.

[Sound: Dinging]

LL: It seems quaint now and nostalgic—passwords as a game—and as children, passwords to gain entry to the tree house or the secret club. But now, passwords have become a memory-bending chore. What mix of letters, numbers and symbols will keep the hackers at bay? And if I get it right, will I remember it? So, word that passwords may soon be discarded entirely is good news, as long their replacement keeps our bank accounts and personal information safe. I'm Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

Back To Top »

Justin Trudeau faces challenge in first meeting with Donald Trump

Guests: Heather Scoffield, Bruce Heyman, Robert Bothwell

SOUNDCLIP

[Singing]

And when Irish eyes are smiling

Sure, they steal your heart away.

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

LL: And that is from the so-called Shamrock Summit of 1985—Prime Minister Brian Mulroney belting it out on stage with US President Ronald Reagan. That duet certainly marked a high note in the history of Canada-US relations. The two leaders were said to enjoy a very good working relationship—one that culminated in a historic free trade agreement. But fast forward three decades to today's first in-person meeting between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Donald Trump, and few are predicting any musical numbers let alone harmony. Of course, Mr. Trump has vowed to renegotiate free trade and has advanced a number of policies that don't quite fit with Mr. Trudeau's sunny vision of the world. Nevertheless, getting the US-Canada relationship right is vital for any prime minister.

SOUNDCLIP

The emphasis of our meeting is certainly going to be on creating a strong economy and good jobs for Canadians and Americans on both sides of the border. But I'm sure that issues of security and others will also come up and I look forward to having very constructive productive discussions with our American neighbours on those two.

LL: So how does the prime minister navigate this relationship and what is he up against? To answer those questions, I'm joined now by Heather Scoffield. She is the Ottawa bureau chief at Canadian Press and she joins us from our Ottawa studio. Hello.

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: Good morning.

LL: What is Prime Minister Trudeau's goal heading into the meeting?

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: I think the main goal here is to come away without anything terrible happening. You know he's going into this not knowing exactly where the president is going to come from and this is very rare in terms of having you know leaders meetings. Usually they go into meetings like this with a plan and a very, very clear idea about what kind of outcomes they will come away with and in this case, they don't actually know and there's a huge amount of uncertainty. So the goal here is to make sure nothing bad happens and also just kind of get some clarity on the relationship and where it can go forward. The best outcome that they could hope for, I think at this point, is to set down some principles and some agreement on very broad areas where they can actually move forward on. And if they come away with a piece of paper on that kind of thing that states you know like here are our shared values or that kind of thing, that would be an astounding success.

LL: Well, you're setting the bar it sounds like fairly low.

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: Well, it's so unpredictable at this point and I think you know because there's such a huge lack of clarity—it's upset the business community, the politics are in turmoil around the world— that getting clarity and some kind of predictability here is actually quite an accomplishment and it would go a long way in terms of setting the relationship up between Canada and the United States for the coming years.

LL: Well, we know that they've already decided to have a so-called round table about women in business so that's one thing, but what do you think the real focus of this meeting is about in terms of issues between the countries?

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: Well, I think they want to talk about trade for sure. There is a lack of clarity there in terms of what President Trump wants to do about renegotiating NAFTA. The timing of that, the scope of that is very unclear, so even to get a little bit of a broader explanation about where he intends to go there. The border in general is an area of discussion. Sorry, the border’s an area of discussion in terms of how porous it is and I think Justin Trudeau is going to be doing a lot of explaining about how Canada controls its immigration and the kind of security measures we have to make sure that the border is safe and that our external borders are safe. And also in terms of national defence, Donald Trump has frequently expressed concerns about NATO and how it works in the world and you know Canada's role in that so there would be a quest for some clarity there too. So security, trade and the border are for sure going to be top of mind.

LL: And the border of course, the issues seem to go both ways right now. I mean last week Yassine Aber, who’s a Canadian student of Moroccan ancestry was turned away when he tried to enter the United States. How problematic are these kinds of incidents for Trudeau when he's trying to establish common ground with President Trump?

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: They're quite problematic because you know Justin Trudeau up until the Trump election was very adamant about Canada's open borders. He ran on that during his own election in 2015 about welcoming more people to Canada, especially Syrian refugees, and has made a virtue out of out of welcoming people from all over the world and says you know frequently that diversity is Canada's strength. And that’s the opposite approach of what Donald Trump has run on. So you know Trudeau I think will be walking on eggshells a little bit in that discussion in terms of how does he stay true to his values and also you know true to what he ran on? It's not just a personal thing. It's also something that he has communicated frequently with the Canadian electorate. How does he stand by that at the same time as not poking a stick in Donald Trump's eye, which he really, really doesn't want to do either.

LL: Well, there's the private discussions and then as we know, there is going to be a news conference later on today. That's where I think the real test might come for the prime minister. Does he keep his lips zipped?

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: Well, there's so much body language and it will be a widely watched news conference here too. So you know I think it's going to be a difficult balancing act for Justin Trudeau to you know he's got to portray a certain amount of friendliness with Donald Trump and he also doesn't want to go too far because they don't share a lot of the same values. And then at the same time he's got to deliver some messages for the domestic audience and also set minds at ease. So there's a whole bunch of things going on there and it will be some very interesting political theatre to watch this afternoon.

LL: And I know you talk to people on the inside of the prime minister's office about these kinds of things. How closely have they been watching Trump's interactions with other world leaders?

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: I can't imagine their weekend this weekend because there's so many things going on there that you know because Donald Trump is so unpredictable, there are a lot of people in Ottawa that are watching very closely, that have watched the whole meeting going on throughout the weekend with Abe, the head of Japan. They spent several days together so you know everybody's trying to figure out what clues, what can we take from that that Justin Trudeau can take with him to Washington? That was a very productive meeting it seems. Everything went smoothly for Japan but that was not the case with the prime minister of Australia just a couple of weeks ago, right? That conversation with Donald Trump was cut off after just halfway through.

LL: Well, I guess we'll be watching closely. Heather, thank you.

HEATHER SCOFFIELD: My pleasure.

LL: Heather Scoffield is the Ottawa bureau chief for the Canadian Press and she was in our Ottawa studio. My next guest says it's key that Prime Minister Trudeau establish a good working relationship with President Trump during this first meeting. Bruce Heyman served as the US ambassador to Canada from March of 2014 until January the 20th of this year. The Trump administration ordered all ambassadors put in place by former President Barack Obama to be out of their posts by Inauguration Day. Bruce Heyman joins us now from Aspen, Colorado. Hello.

BRUCE HEYMAN: Good morning. How are you?

LL: I'm fine, thank you. What are you going to be looking for from today's meeting?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Well, a lot of the meeting that takes place is heavily scripted and heavily worked out between the White House and the prime minister's office. I've been able to work on several of these meetings, both when the prime minister came to Washington and when the president came to Ottawa. And so the schedule, the fact sheets, statements—a lot of this has all been scripted out. So what you're going to want to see is the balance of tone, how that negotiation works through in terms of any official statement that's being released and how balanced that statement is. But you'll also want to watch very carefully the Q&A during the press brief because that's not scripted. And so you get to hear from the president and the prime minister immediate reactions and feelings as a result of the day that they spent together.

LL: We do have more of the agenda now. And I wonder if you can do a little tea leaf reading for me. They've decided to have this round table on women in business. What do you see as the point of that?

BRUCE HEYMAN: I think that's fabulous. First of all, I think that there is clearly a hand that's coming in both from the prime minister who's worked hard to promote women not only within his cabinet and government and business overall, but also addressing I think some early concerns that the president has had where as you know just the day after the inauguration, there were women marches all over not only the United States but all over the world. And I think that that's probably a hand of someone either in the family—maybe his daughter or others within the White House—that thought this would be a good balancing moment for the president as well. So I think it's brilliant actually.

LL: Let's move over to the economy then because I think most people thought that the focus of this meeting was going to be about trade. What do you think the prime minister needs to say to President Trump on that file?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Canadian jobs and American jobs are interlinked. And when you do business with Canada, you create jobs on both sides of the border. The prime minister recently and his cabinet as well as others have been telling this story I think effectively. The question is how effective have they been to getting that message into the White House? Millions of US jobs are a result of our trade with Canada. Thirty-five states—the number one trading relationship in terms of exports from those 35 states—go to Canada. But not only this 35. The other 15, the number two or three country of exports is Canada. So the US is very dependent on job creation in large part because of our relationship with Canada. We have a trade surplus. It's an effective trading relationship. So if they dive in, if they start talking about NAFTA, this is a case in point where not only is it balanced but I think it's served to the benefit of both countries and the president has said that he wants to renegotiate NAFTA. But I think it's important for Canada to get the message across that you know this isn't a one way street. It's two way and we work together.

LL: At the same time, a lot of Canadians are going to be watching to see what, if anything is discussed on touchier issues like immigration and also the travel ban, issues like that. Do you see that being discussed openly before the media, before the cameras and how much tension do you possibly see emerging from that?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Only if and depends on what the question is that comes from the media and how that's handled. And that's the test I think for both of these leaders: how you respond to this knowing that you share this 5,525-mile border with Alaska and then across the 49^th parallel with 120 border crossings and 400,000 people cross a day. An effective US-Canada border is important to our trading relationship and our tourism and commerce. So you can't have that conversation in a silo. That being said, this is the first face to face meeting. It's a relationship builder. And as things progress, I think the one thing that needs to be continually emphasized is the trading relationship. But you know as you mentioned, the border is an integral part of that relationship.

LL: You saw the so-called bromance between President Obama and Prime Minister Trudeau up close. These two men couldn't seemingly be more different in terms of personal styles and even values and approaches. How do you think they're going to be able to develop a relationship?

BRUCE HEYMAN: Well, both of these men have a common shared interest in one, prosperity for our shared populations—the prime minister for Canadians, the president for Americans—and shared protection of North America. I think if we stayed focused initially on this relationship on those areas where we have you know like-minded outcomes, I think that things will get off to a good start. It’s always important that those first impressions are good ones and I have a lot of confidence in the prime minister that he'll do that.

LL: Alright. Thank you very much.

BRUCE HEYMAN: You're welcome.

LL: Bruce Heyman served as the US ambassador to Canada from March of 2014 until January the 20th of this year and he spoke with us from Aspen, Colorado. Now finally to help put today's meeting into some historical context, I'm joined by Robert Bothwell. He is the May Gluskin Chair in Canadian history at the University of Toronto and author of Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada. And Robert Bothwell is here with me in Toronto. Hello.

ROBERT BOTHWELL: Good morning.

LL: How does today's meeting compared to previous first time meetings between Canada's prime minister and the US presidents?

ROBERT BOTHWELL: Well, the comparison actually is Justin's father meeting Richard Nixon back in 1969 and the two of them had nothing in common really. Nixon was very unpleasant and not at all charming and wasn't known for physical attractiveness and Trudeau was all the opposite things. And Nixon distrusted elites and he distrusted intellectuals. He called them eggheads and he certainly called Trudeau an egghead. So there was no basic compatibility. On the other hand, Nixon was extremely intelligent. He wasn't actually a conservative. He agreed with Trudeau on many policy issues and so they didn't actually find it all that difficult to agree and they stuck to business. And it's a strange thing. But Nixon was able to transcend it and so was Trudeau. Trudeau just thought well, you know it's part of the deal. And Nixon thought oh well, you know I have to deal with that blankety blank Trudeau. But Nixon called everybody a blankety blank.

LL: Okay. So given present day Trudeau, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, what do you think he needs to do in this meeting with Trump given what you understand of historical context?

ROBERT BOTHWELL: Well, it's different. It’s different in the sense that Trump is very different from Nixon. Nixon always was on top of his brief. All the indications are that Trump doesn't study, doesn't take briefing very well, doesn't have much background and rejects attempts to get him to master it. So that's extremely different. I rather expect Justin will be rather like his father and he will go in very briefed. I think actually the prime minister's office has been doing almost nothing else since November. So we can count on our prime minister to be very prepared. As for Trump, well, you know it's just like watching a storm in a teacup. You don't know which way the storm is going to go.

LL: Okay. So you set the context mainly of looking at Trudeau's father and Nixon. And yet you say even though they may not have got along personally, they managed to get the business done. How do you think this will unfold between this Trudeau and Trump? Will the relationship dictate how the work gets done?

ROBERT BOTHWELL: Well, there's another comparison and that's Ronald Reagan and Reagan wasn't a deep studier. And during his presidency, what he did was rely absolutely on a whole coterie of people who surrounded him. So their job was to keep Reagan looking good. And so the main thing was not exactly to keep Reagan under control but to feed him the necessary lines and to prevent anything untoward happening. Because Reagan had basically a rather sunny disposition, this wasn't all that hard. So it really depends a lot who's in the room. It depends on who's seen Trump in the last 10 minutes and it may depend on his mood. But I'm sure the American instinct—even on the cabinet level and certainly the bureaucracy—is to try and keep from saying or doing anything doing anything untoward as with Australia.

LL: It's interesting too in that we're now seeing and hearing that Ivanka Trump has been involved in designing this round table that they're going to have women in business. You mean she's the one who's spoken to him in the last 10 minutes. Is history any lesson about how family members play into these things and family relationships?

ROBERT BOTHWELL: Well, it's not unknown. I mean there have been presidents in the past who have employed their family members, most notably Jack Kennedy who had his brother as attorney general. So you know that's not forbidden. There are precedents and they're not always bad precedents. We don't know an awful lot about Ivanka, except for her quarrel with Nordstrom and her designer clothes and so on and of course, her husband. And I guess we can expect they certainly have been functioning as though they are serious advisers to the president. So it may matter a lot what kind of briefings Kushner and Ivanka get.

LL: Now as we look ahead again to today, it seems as though Trudeau may be caught between a rock and a hard place. He can't be seen to be starting any kind of a trade war or set off the president but he can't be seen by Canadians as capitulating. How does he navigate that path?

ROBERT BOTHWELL: Well, of course we try to avoid the issues in which we're bound to disagree. Canada—

LL: Isn’t that capitulation though? Avoiding the issue?

ROBERT BOTHWELL: No, not at all. What are you going to do? They’re 10 times the size of Canada. They're much more powerful and richer. They are our principal trading partners. You don't really go out of your way to tell somebody that you think their suit looks atrocious or that you know they don't seem to have washed this morning. So yeah. Of course you try to avoid the really contentious issues. You don't go in and choose subjects in which you're bound to have a fight and you would with Trump. I think there's no doubt of that. I mean not the kind of person that you easily provoke. So no, I don't think that's too bad.

LL: Okay. We've run out of time. Interesting talking to you. Thank you very much. Robert Bothwell is professor of history at the University of Toronto and the author of many books including Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada. He was in Toronto.

Back To Top »

Hundreds of whales die on beach, mass strandings remain a mystery

Guests: David Lusseau

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come, we're told to make them hopelessly complicated, never write them down and change them frequently. So is it really any wonder that no one can remember their online passwords? Answering and inputting passwords is one of the necessary evils of our digital age. But that could soon be changing. The post password era in half an hour. But first—

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Whale calls]

LL: Saving the whales.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This is the third largest mass stranding that we've recorded in our history. So it's a very large one. Logistically it's a massive undertaking.

VOICE 2: People from all over the world, anyone who’s within [unintelligible] has heard about this so we’ve just come over. We bought three hitchhikers over who just said they wanted to come here and do whatever they could.

VOICE 3: Yeah, the water is cold but it’s fine. It’s good to be here and help.

[Sound: Water splashing]

LL: Those are the voices of people doing what they could to save some fellow mammals along the tip of New Zealand's South Island. According to officials there, more than 650 pilot whales were part of two mass strandings over recent days. As a cleanup operation began on Monday, more than 350 whales died. More than 200 whales were able to refloat themselves and swim away while volunteer rescuers were able to rescue and refloat 100 whales. It was the third largest mass stranding in New Zealand's history and the largest in living memory and it made headlines around the world, not just for the sheer tragedy of it all, but also for the mystery of it. To help shed some light on all of this, I'm joined by David Lusseau. He is a professor of behavioral biology at the University of Aberdeen and we have reached him in Aberdeen, Scotland. Hello.

LL: Good morning, Laura.

LL: How common are mass strandings of this magnitude?

DAVID LUSSEAU: Not at all. As you just rightfully said, this is a unusually large mass stranding only surpassed a few times in kind of living memory.

LL: Now we're going to get to the explanation of why this might happen in a moment but first, you've seen stranded whales. Tell me what that's like.

DAVID LUSSEAU: It's an emotional roller coaster. So I’ve attended necropsies so when we get to whales that have been dead. I've never been to a mass stranding. I've been in one case where the whale died within minutes of us arriving there. I’ve followed as well dolphins as they were on their way and dying as well. As I was saying it's an emotional rollercoaster you know and we have to really give our thanks to all the department of conservation staff and all the volunteers that have been [unintelligible] over the weekend to try to help as many to survive. And essentially you know if you get to it alive well, you have to make a very quick assessment whether it's worth trying to refloat or whether you have to help it.

LL: Can you tell how distressed the whales are?

DAVID LUSSEAU: Yes. Yes. And actually the presence of people—[unintelligible] whales is often it seems [unintelligible] in many instances. I mean unfortunately we—I am talking about myself but you know all the amazing people that have been working on strandings have collected a lot of experience over the past 20 years. So right now we have a good understanding of how to behave around these animals and what's the best way to go. And indeed you know it's very silly to say but that's not where they should be and they know it and get distressed. And you know in cases where they're injured, it adds to their distress as well. But you know people, like the people that acted in New Zealand, can do a lot, either to help them get to the end or to refloat.

LL: Can we get to the science behind this? Why would hundreds of whales all beach themselves at the same time?

DAVID LUSSEAU: It's crazy, isn't it? So there are a few hotspots around the world like the Farewell Spit, so Golden Bay where this stranding has occurred, which are very, very tricky to navigate as a dolphin. Pilot whales are dolphins. And it's because they are very, very shallow waters and these kind of long tidal beach which are covered in soft sand but are shallow. And using echolocation, it’s actually very, very hard to navigate around there.

LL: When you say echolocation, that is the whales making sounds to bounce off rocks.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Exactly. That’s exactly what I was going to say. So dolphins use echolocation. So what I mean by that, instead of using their eyes, they use sound like bats to try to visualize what the environment looks like so that they know where to go as they’re navigating. And these kind of places are just very, very hard to navigate. So you might get a high tide and you can't get in to Golden Bay and everything's fine. And suddenly the tide comes down and you know it's just you know as tragic as when people get caught by tides the other way around. So when water comes in and people are caught by the water. It's a reverse. The whales are caught by the sand suddenly [unintelligible] everywhere and you don't know where to go to get out of the way. And you've got the kind of tragic events like we have this weekend. So these whales travel in very large schools which is why if a navigation error like this one happen in these kind of instances, it's not just going to be one or two whales going to strand but it's everybody that's around.

LL: So that's one possible explanation, but do you know with any certainty that that is the issue?

DAVID LUSSEAU: So until we've got autopsies, so necropsies for the whales that are dead, we cannot be sure about anything. We know that mass stranding and strandings can happen for many, many different reasons. It just happens that in this location, it is really a location where most often that seems to be what happens, especially with pilot whales in this location. Essentially almost every year we've got a mass stranding of pilot whales in this location.

LL: It really is quite remarkable though that after centuries of these mass strandings—and I hear what you're saying about the one in New Zealand—we still don't have that one certain answer as to why these kinds of things happen.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think you know we have a lot of hypotheses. We have a lot of ideas and I think the reason why it is so hard to really comprehend, it’s because actually it's likely that all these hypotheses are right and it depends on each mass stranding what has happened. So sometimes some whales are sick and others are following the sick ones and the whole school strands. And you know until you either kind of help the sequence to pass on, then it's very hard to withdraw the others. But another fact that’s— the amazing volunteers that worked this weekend managed to refloat successfully whales and they didn’t restrand, really kind of helped to indicate that you know this was really a school that got into navigational problems.

LL: Right. It's interesting that some were refloated and then actually beached again.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Yeah. So in some instances, that would be the case when some particular whales are still on the beach that these individuals that have been refloated are waiting for. And it's particularly again you know we fall into conjecture there. We fall into hypothesis [unintelligible]. But you know the prevailing idea really is the social structure of these species like long-finned pilot whales is such that there are some individuals that play a key role in the society. So it might be the grandmums. That might be the mums, the aunts, so they’re kind of leading these kind of matrilineal, matriarchal societies. And if these girls, these female whales are not part of a school that's refloated, it is not uncommon it seems indeed that the other whales will come back and wait for them.

LL: And I do want to get into that some more but just first, in August of 2000, 16 pilot whales became stuck on the rocky shores of St. George's Bay in Cape Breton here in Canada. And CBC Radio's own Carol Off, who is the co-host of As It Happens, happened to be in the area at the time and was among the group of people who managed to rescue 10 of them. Just have a listen to what she had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

So these massive creatures, and the blow hole, you know, just every now and then just a big burst of steam and hot air so you knew they were living. And we just inched them as best we could off the rocks, and then started to manoeuver them out onto the water. It was like wrestling with an elephant. Finally we just got enough of them out there and suddenly there was this moment when some kind of communication between them and they all started to move together.

LL: Now David Lusseau, how common are these kinds of whale strandings in Canada?

DAVID LUSSEAU: I do not know. I don't think that common actually. So I spent a little bit of time in Pleasant Bay in, let me see—it was in the early 2000s—with pilot whales and there hasn't been that—I don't think the kind of magnitude of mass strandings we're talking about with what happens in New Zealand is really common in Canada. You will get these you know multiple strandings with multiple animals like the one that was just described, but again, they tend not to be regular occurrences, unfortunately like we see in places like Farewell Spit, [unintelligible] New Zealand in both cases.

LL: Right. Now you mentioned before we heard that tape—you were talking about the matriarchal nature of the whale pods and you just heard Carol say that there seemed to be some communication among the whales that were beached in Cape Breton to finally move out. And so I'm wondering how much impact social familial relationships play when it comes both to the beachings and actually getting out?

DAVID LUSSEAU: Yeah. So I think a large part, it is a bit hard for us to relate to what it's like to be a pilot whale in a school. But essentially, with these species, the best way to think about it is imagine as if you are born and spend all your life and for all of your life you've never been further away than maybe a couple of hundred metres from your mom, and spend all this time with your moms and your aunts and your sisters in the same place, moving around all the time together. And I'm not talking just coming back for Thanksgiving and Christmas but I'm talking every single day, every single hour, that's who you're with. And your whole life is centered around your family, your family unit. And again, their family unit is not a kind of unit we think about nowadays in human societies, you know smaller units but we're really talking about the wider family. In this kind of context, in a way, your family’s your life essentially. It makes sense, but—

LL: It’s almost anthropomorphizing them. It sounds to me like you're suggesting that if the mom decides that it is time for her to go and maybe die somewhere, then the family members are going to follow and it's almost an act of suicide.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Well, it's not, no. So I'm not talking about active decisions but I'm thinking, I'm talking about situations like this one where there is going to be a navigation error. You know as part of a school, you're following whoever is making decisions about the school movements or you are part of a crowd but that crowd is your whole family, right? And you're essentially caught into that movement as well. So these kind of errors will mean that you’re just caught up and you get to these kind of mass stranding situations because you're part of a crowd and it's very hard for you to think or comprehend as not being part of that crowd. So moving away from a dangerous situation or finding a way independently to get yourself out of a situation. And so that's why that we’re thinking about it. You know it's a bit hard for us to relate but that’s a way to think about it. Indeed when you think about situations where you've got sick animals that are stranding for one reason or another, simply because they are sick and so therefore they can't swim so well anymore or because they're trying to catch their breath maybe and get into shallows. Again, you’re part of a school and you know the school goes where everybody goes. So the errors can happen. So I'm not talking about an active conscious decision to strand but I'm talking about decision errors that are because you have some big overrides about you know I stick with mom.

LL: Right. But one of the things that we haven't discussed yet though is the potential effects of things like food supplies or climate change. Could that be a factor?

DAVID LUSSEAU: Very hard to know. So for sure, you know the kind of situation we have seen this weekend, we've seen before. These locations are stranding hotspots. Why that is we don't know. So we know you know that once they get into Golden Bay or on Farewell Spit, it's a tough place to get out. But why would they turn between the two islands, between the north and south island of New Zealand in there for these kind of more pelagic species? Is it because they're following food? Who knows. Now why did we get such a large school? Is it because the individuals are more concentrated in space because as you said, there might be less food so they’re concentrating on fewer spots for food? Who knows. We don't know anything about that. For sure though, we are entering into a much more unpredictable environment because of climate change. And it's not just that there is less food. It's just that things are much more unpredictable. It's not just us that have to face unpredictable weather or unpredictable climate, but every other species on the planet do as well. So it is clearly of high interest now to really keep an eye and understand how the frequency of these mass strandings might associate with changes in climate in the southern oceans.

LL: Let's get back to the actual scene in New Zealand. You have these hundreds of beached whales, people trying to help them survive. What is the best way to try to save these beached whales?

LL: How long can they stay alive once they’re beached?

DAVID LUSSEAU: So there’s two issues. The biggest issue is for animals that are you know larger like pilot whales. Their own weight becomes a problem. So it's very hard for them to sustain their own weight on land. And so you start to have damages to internal organs because essentially they’re crushing their own organs with their own weight. So the thing you need to do is firstly to keep them wet. So you’ll see often animals are covered with sheets or blankets that have been soaked with water and that allows their skin to stay wet and that's very important to avoid skin damage. And then from there on with these kind of animals, it's very hard to actually transport the animal back into whatever they are without jeopardizing their health. So maybe [unintelligible]. So it really all depends on the configuration of the situation. Moving from you know trying to get trenches to get them back to the water to just keeping them wet until [unintelligible] come back and then try to refloat them with the tides. But the hurdle is really coordination as well. So you really need to coordinate these efforts across a large number of whales, so that once you refloat them, they actually go away as opposed to come back and wait for the others.

LL: So we're at this point now where the reasons why mass strandings occur are unclear. And I think I know what the answer is. Is there anything that can be done to help stop them from happening?

DAVID LUSSEAU: I wish there was. I wish there was a silver bullet. In these kind of instances like these ones, you know it is clear that they have happened for a long, long time. It's also clear that it's actually quite hard to get to the whales before they are in trouble in places like that, so it’s very hard to see the whales before they get to the shallows in these areas. So unfortunately I'm afraid it's very tough. There is going to be other instances where there might be possibilities to try to you know help the whales get out of the shallows. Again, there might be other instances where the animals are getting in these situations not because of navigation errors but because some are sick or not. It's really going to be a case by case situation but unfortunately I think we don't have enough eyes underwater enough of a time to really be preventive about it as opposed to just essentially react to a crisis when it happens.

LL: Now both in this case and in the case in Cape Breton that I mentioned earlier, these were pilot whales. Are these the only breed of whales that do this kind of thing?

DAVID LUSSEAU: No, others mass strand as well, but these tend to be—they do tend to be the major culprits—forgive my word—of mass stranding. So this kind of size of mass strandings will really be concentrated around pilot whales.

LL: Why is that?

DAVID LUSSEAU: They do move in very large schools. They have this social structure which is quite rigid compared to a lot of the other pelagic dolphins that we have out there that tends to be in more efficient societies. So whale schools are much more dynamic and [unintelligible]. Is that the reason? I don't know but that's definitely the distinction between that species and the others.

LL: I want to bring it back around to something that we started with. You have witnessed this yourself and I'm wondering what it is like for scientists like you to see animals suffer like this.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Oh, it's horrible. You know science doesn't vaccinate you against emotion. So it's a pretty horrible thing and it's something that stays with you for a long time. I mean for my situation where I accompanied individuals until they died. Actually it wasn't a stranding but it was dolphins, individual dolphins that I spent a lot of time with, actually in New Zealand as well. And that dolphin had been—it was a large male that had been attacked by a shark and took a good week to die after the injuries. And so we were following that individual underwater all week and it's an individual that I spent years with underwater. And it’s very tough. It’s going to sound silly to many of your listeners maybe, but once you can have this kind of relationship forming, even if you’re a scientist, you’re not immune to those. It's no different. It is akin to losing somebody that you know really well.

LL: I don't think that that sounds silly at all and I thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us about this.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Thanks for having me.

LL: Bye-bye.

DAVID LUSSEAU: Bye-bye.

LL: David Lusseau is a professor of behavioral biology at the University of Aberdeen and we reached him in Aberdeen, Scotland.

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LL: A message now for everyone in the Toronto area: as you may know, The Current has been holding a series of public forums on missing and murdered Indigenous women across the country. And it's also a chance for you to experience our interactive virtual reality documentary, The Highway of Tears. We'll be holding a special event in Toronto on February the 22nd at 7:00 p.m. The Toronto event is going to be focused on Indigenous youth and there is a lot more information on our website at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Tickets are free but you do need to reserve them in advance and you can do so on our website as well. Once again, February the 22nd in Toronto at 7:00 p.m. Head to our website to reserve your seats now at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour, if you always forget your passwords, then there could soon be hope. Tech watchers say the future of passwords could be no more passwords. Yay. I’m Laura Lynch and you are listening to The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Back To Top »

Death of the password? Biometrics could be the future of digital security

Guests: Bob O’Donnell, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Julie Thorpe, Christopher Collins

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current. I'd like to let you know about something coming up tomorrow on the program. Scientists are planning to march on Washington, DC but the question is: will it do any good? We'll hear from Valerie Aquino who is an organizer of the March for Science.

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The first week of the new administration here had caused a lot of concerns among the science community and science supporters with their actions and threats to do further damage to scientific interest and the science community. And then I also had profound concerns with anti-science and anti-intellectual narratives that I find an alarming trend to de-legitimize, ignore or outright reject scientific expertise and empirical evidence. But our message is that we're championing good science and application. That's our bottom line. We believe science is vital to the prosperity of democracy and this relationship between science and democracy, we see it being under threat right now. And it's frightening and it has potential damage for all global citizens.

LL: More from Valerie Aquino on the march for science and the case against it. That's tomorrow on The Current. Okay. Strengthen your passwords. That's what grocery chain Loblaws was warning its PC Plus members last week after some members had points stolen from their accounts. Now Loblaws itself wasn't hacked. The company said the passwords likely came from hacks at other companies. But its customers were likely re-using their passwords for their PC points. Of course, it is just the latest episode in a long list of problematic stories about passwords and you've probably heard and ignored plenty of warnings in the past about switching up your passwords and making them more secure. But then again, no one could ever guess your key passwords, could they? We sent the CBC's Jack Julian out on the streets of Halifax to try his luck.

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VOICE 1: So do you think I could guess your password? Let's say your Facebook password?

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 1: No? Can I try?

VOICE 2: Sure.

VOICE 1: Okay. Have you ever owned a pet?

VOICE 2: Yes.

VOICE 1: What was the pet’s name?

VOICE 2: Well, if I tell you that, you'll know.

VOICE 1: A-ha.

VOICE 2: You would have to know a pet from many years ago.

VOICE 1: But I was right on the money.

VOICE 2: Yes.

VOICE 1: So how secure do you think passwords are?

VOICE 2: Well, probably not overly secure. I'm guilty for using a lot of common themes from before, common number combinations.

VOICE 1: You mean so across many websites.

VOICE 2: Yes.

VOICE 1: So now that I know about your pet, I might be able to get into like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, the works.

VOICE 2: Yeah. Well, Facebook is a unique pet but I use another pet across some others.

VOICE 1: At work.

VOICE 2: Not for my work. For my work, I try to have them a little more secure.

VOICE 1: Do you think I could guess one of your passwords?

VOICE 3: I don't think so.

VOICE 1: Can I try?

VOICE 3: You can try, yeah.

VOICE 1: What bands do you like? What music do you like to listen to?

VOICE 3: Well, if I give you the answer, then that might give it away.

VOICE 1: So like ImABelieber2017? Something like that?

VOICE 3: No, no. Not quite that. I like, I guess, electronic music.

VOICE 1: Did I just kind of get one of your passwords maybe?

VOICE 3: Yeah. Yeah. Sort of.

VOICE 1: That's two for two for me. So how does that make you feel?

VOICE 3: Well, I guess it’s a pretty obscure band from the nineties, so I don't know most people would get it though.

VOICE 1: Do you think I could guess one of your passwords?

VOICE 4: No, you wouldn't.

VOICE 1: No way? Can I try?

VOICE 4: Yeah.

VOICE 1: Okay. Do you have a nickname?

VOICE 4: No, my son does though.

VOICE 1: Okay. So would your son's nickname be a good guess for one of your passwords?

VOICE 4: Mhm. Yeah, it is one of them, yeah. And one's an ex-boyfriend.

VOICE 1: Oh. Well, I hope your ex isn't listening right now.

VOICE 4: I hope not.

VOICE 1: So how secure are those passwords if I can just guess them like that?

VOICE 4: But you don't know their names.

VOICE 1: That's true. That's true. So you feel your passwords are safe?

VOICE 4: Yeah. Because I have their names but then I also have numbers after.

VOICE 1: So the last three people I've talked to, I've been able to kind of guess their password just randomly. Does that mean your passwords are safe?

VOICE 4: Not really.

LL: Okay. Our thanks to CBC's Jack Julian for that phishing expedition and I say phishing with a P-H. It's these exact kinds of vulnerabilities that he managed to find without much trouble that has some technology insiders calling for the death of the password. Companies from Google to MasterCard to Samsung are looking at increasingly high-tech alternatives to the old fashioned password and in many cases, biometrics is the buzz word, describing technologies like fingerprints and facial scanning that could soon make the old-fashioned password obsolete. Android users can now complete online purchases with a touch of a fingertip, while Royal Bank offers a service that identifies a customer's unique voice allowing them a faster banking experience. Now in the race to replace the password, smaller companies are jumping on board too. Karl Martin is the founder of Toronto-based startup Nymi, which makes a wristband that reads your unique heart rhythms and it uses that to verify who you are.

SOUNDCLIP

Essentially you wear it. It transmits wirelessly and unlocks your devices and accounts without you having to take any extra effort. You're not having to remember you know any sort of complex secrets, your passphrases or passwords. Literally you just wear the device and it works on your behalf to unlock everything. Everybody has a unique cardiac rhythm like a fingerprint. So the idea is that if you lose your wristband, it won't work for anyone else. At the end of the day when you're comparing to the world we live in with passwords, it's essentially orders of magnitude more secure but also more convenient. Industry and technology have had tunnel vision where we've put so much burden on the user to say prove who you are. That's a burden. It's like a tax we pay on our mental energy every day.

LL: That's Karl Martin, the founder of the tech startup Nymi. And to tell us what else tech firms have up their sleeves, we're joined now by Bob O'Donnell. He's the founder and president of Technalysis, a California-based market research consultancy. His clients include major names like Microsoft, HP and Dell and he joins us via Skype from Foster City, California. Hello.

BOB O’DONNELL: Good morning. How are you?

LL: I'm fine, thank you. How important do you think it is to find an alternative to passwords?

BOB O’DONNELL: Incredibly important. Your little intro piece was a perfect example of the issue because it is not difficult for people to have their passwords discovered through various types of phishing attacks. So things like Nymi, which is a very interesting solution, other things out there—the fingerprint scanners we all have on our phones and other kinds of technologies—this is where things have to go. It’s not even a question. Everybody re-uses passwords. Everybody has different mechanisms. You know the stories out there are horrendous. And to be clear, you know there isn't a perfect solution because now when we start to talk about biometrics, as you mentioned—and that involves anything involving your body, you know the heart rhythm, fingerprint scan, iris scanning is another one, facial recognition, voice recognition—you know some of these things eventually look, if somebody really wants to hack into it,they can capture that data. But at the end of the day—

LL: How can they hack into your biometric data? How can they hack into your fingerprint or your heart rhythm?

BOB O’DONNELL: There have been you know reported cases if you took a high resolution photo of somebody sticking their finger up in the air while they were giving a presentation and you scanned it, way in with a—because cameras are so high in resolution—theoretically you could get the pattern and some hackers, they proved that once. But the reality is it's very difficult to do. And what this is all about is reducing the risk. That's fundamentally what we're all about here. So what you need to do is dramatically reduce the risk and that's what all of these biometric tools will do. A, they keep you from having to remember the passwords that we always forget or just re-use constantly and B, they dramatically reduce the risk and therefore make it a much safer environment in general. So I think we're going to see a lot of effort. I mean look, think about it now. Most everybody uses a fingerprint scanner on their phone as a form of authentication. That's what it's called. That's the fancy word for it. It's a means of identifying yourself. And as we move forward, I think we'll actually see what's called dual factor authentication, meaning you use two different things. So maybe you speak at it and you use your thumbprint, which makes it infinitely harder. Even if someone somehow managed to you know get one of those things, getting two factors is extraordinarily difficult. So that's what I think will be the future.

LL: If this is such a great idea, why has it taken so long to get this out to the public?

BOB O’DONNELL: Well, the issue is the obviously we've seen the biometric things come into play. But the bigger issue unfortunately is you can get into your own device. Really what's happened that slowed things down is therein passing along your identity to other services. Different standards have been developed to do that you know essentially authentication of yourself. So you log in to your phone, that's fine. But what you want to do then is you want to log into your banking account. Well, in order to do that, there needs to be a standardized way to move from your device to your banking account to making a purchase on Amazon to signing into your work VPN and getting your work e-mail. All of those have different ways of doing it and there have been a lot of battles unfortunately around different ways to pass along that data. So that's essentially what we're starting to see is some agreement around some of those standards, which is a huge leap forward because you know what you want to be able to do is not just log into your device—which again, most people now already do—but extend that capability so that when you log into your device, it will log in for you securely to your again, to your banking website or what have you.

LL: Once we get there though, is this going to be failsafe?

BOB O’DONNELL: Well again, that's why I said at the beginning, no. Nothing is completely ever failsafe. But can you dramatically reduce the risk? Yes. And that's what we're seeing is a dramatic, like enormous risk reduction that happens with this and every factor you add is sort of an exponential increase in security. And so you know in very, very secure types of environments—military and certain levels of government—they're already using multi-factor biometrics and those you know are very tough to crack. Every time you add that one, like I said, it's sort of an exponential increase. So I think we will see it. But you'd never want to say it's completely safe. But for most people, it should be fine.

LL: Just briefly then, what is the timeline on this? When am I going to be able to use my eyeball or my fingerprint or my heartbeat to get into all of my accounts?

BOB O’DONNELL: Well, you know I think we'll see some of this stuff this year. I mean arguably again, you know fingerprint scanners have now been on smartphones for several years and are fairly common. Iris scanners are just starting to hit. The Nymi product has been, we've been waiting for that for a while. It’s very interesting technology. And there'll be others you know who are doing other types of things. We've seen some facial recognition for a few years. It wasn't great to be honest with you. But now with higher resolution cameras, it's getting better and we've got a lot more computing intelligence in the back end doing you know sort of artificial intelligence-like recognition of who you are, where you are, things like that.

LL: Okay. Thank you very much.

BOB O’DONNELL: Thank you, Laura.

LL: Bye-bye.

BOB O’DONNELL: Bye-bye.

LL: Bob O'Donnell is the president of market research consultancy firm Technalysis. He is in Foster City, California. Well, of course, passwords have been with us since well before Facebook and e-mail. Think back to when you were a kid and you had to know the secret word to get into the fort. Passwords of one kind or another have a rich history and those who study them say they're likely to be with us for a long time to come. Lorrie Faith Cranor is professor of computer science and engineering as well as the director of the privacy and security lab at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies and that's a company that does security training including for passwords. She doesn't do work for them anymore but remains a shareholder. And she joins us now from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hello.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Hello.

LL: So most kids love the idea of a secret password, but how do you feel now when you have to choose a new password for some system?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Yeah. I think when I have a new password I have to choose, there's this moment of panic where I need to come up with something really unique and I'll remember it. And that’s hard.

LL: What is it then? Why do so many of us hate them? Because it is hard to remember? What?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Well, we're being asked to do something that's fundamentally very difficult. We're supposed to choose for every account a unique and hard-to-guess password that we can remember. And most of us are not really very good at remembering things. You know if you're like me, like you hated having to memorize spelling for you know when you're in elementary school for spelling tests, memorizing passwords is a similar kind of task.

LL: Where does the modern idea of the password originate?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Well, it goes way back to ancient times when there were military encampments and if you left the camp and came back, you had to have your secret password to pass into the encampment. So really, far back.

LL: And how much has it changed since then?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Well, it's a very similar idea. You know in computer systems, we had passwords in the 1960s when they had computers that were being used by multiple people and people didn't want other people messing with their stuff or using up their computer time. So they set up passwords. Back then there weren't very many requirements on them so people might have a password that's three or four letters. But over time, they've been adding more and more requirements.

LL: Does that problem of hacking go back to the sixties as well?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Yes, but on a much smaller scale. People were more worried about the graduate student down the hall getting into their account than you know some hacker in another country.

LL: But it did go on.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: It did. You know initially it was just mostly for fun and games. Now it's very serious business.

LL: Yeah. How do hackers usually get a hold of our passwords these days?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: There are a lot of different ways that they can do it. If it's somebody who is out to get you in particular, they may look for information on your social media pages and things like that to look for your pet’s name, your family members’ names, your birthday and get passwords that way. But often they're not interested in any particular account. They just want to break into any account they can. And so they will go and try to steal the passwords for you know an entire system and when they steal them, they're usually in an encrypted form, a scrambled form. And so then they run computer programs that just try every possible password. They keep guessing, guessing, guessing and see how many they can crack.

LL: And when you say an entire system, you're talking about perhaps a company's entire set of clients with passwords.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Exactly. So you know a million accounts on the system and they'll try to you know steal all of them and then see how many they can crack.

LL: And once they get them, what do they do?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Well, so once they get a password, they of course can use it to get into the system they stole it from. But more interestingly, they go and try it on other systems because most of us re-use our passwords on multiple systems. So you know if they can get your social network password, then they go and see hmm, do you use that on your bank account? And so that tends to be the trend.

LL: And the bottom line on this, they’re after?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Well, so the hackers mostly want to make money. You know for celebrities, there may be other objectives but for most of us, it's just making money is what the hackers are after.

LL: How good a job are they doing at it these days?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Well, there's a lot of fraud and a lot of loss due to these password breaches.

LL: Okay. Lorrie Faith Cranor, I'd like to bring two other people into this conversation. Julie Thorpe is an associate professor of IT security and Christopher Collins is Canada Research Chair in computer science. They are both at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and they've looked at lists of stolen passwords in an effort to make our passwords more secure. And they're joining us now from Oshawa, Ontario. Hello to both of you.

JULIE THORPE: Hi. Thanks for having us.

LL: Julie Thorpe, let's start with you. Where did you get these lists?

JULIE THORPE: Well, they're actually publicly available. So there has been a number of password breaches over the last decade. And what the hackers have done unfortunately is release them publicly so anybody can download them from the Internet.

LL: And are they usually encrypted when you can download them?

JULIE THORPE: Normally they are. But in some cases, they are completely in the clear. And we did an analysis of one list that was 32 million accounts and they were completely in the clear.

LL: That is astounding. how does that happen?

JULIE THORPE: Because people don't always store their password correctly. So a lot of companies, everybody knows that the way that they should store them is in this obfuscated way that Lorrie was talking about earlier on. But not every company will do the right thing unfortunately.

LL: Now Christopher Collins, you were trying to find patterns in people's passwords. Was there information that surprised you?

CHRISTOPHER COLLINS: Well, yeah. Our goal was to understand the patterns in the passwords that people use in order to help them you know in the future make better passwords. And we found some really interesting patterns that we didn't expect. So things that made passwords a bit different from everyday language. So for example, we found that the most common verb in passwords that we were analyzing was the word love. And it was sort of nice actually to see that. But it was really, really common so I would recommend people don't use that in their passwords.

LL: And what other kinds of things did you see?

CHRISTOPHER COLLINS: Well, we found some interesting things like men's names were four times more likely to be the target of the word love than women's names, which we thought was pretty interesting. We saw the use of profanity much more than we would have expected, given experiments people have done in lab environments. We saw people as you were trying to guess them earlier in the show, people did use their pets. They talked about dogs and cats. Really cute animals, so monkeys and dolphins. Lots of interesting things. We also found some outliers that maybe didn't fit the patterns but they were interesting in like making us think what was the person thinking when they made these passwords? Things like I miss my love or he will marry me someday. Some really evocative things that made me wonder like what was this person thinking?

LL: Interesting. Julie Thorpe, what did you do with the information about the patterns that you found in people's passwords?

JULIE THORPE: So we used all of these passwords in order to learn a model of how people are choosing their passwords in terms of the semantics of them. So what are the common categories of the words that people are choosing and how they relate to each other? So one example is that you know the word love tends to appear with I and a male name is very common. So that would be an example of the kind of things that they would learn. And our ultimate goal of learning this model was to try to figure out you know how are people generally choosing their passwords and how that affects the security of the passwords themselves. So we tested that out against other data sets that were obfuscated or encrypted in order to try to figure out could we guess them? And we found that our method did get more passwords than the previously known methods at that point in time.

LL: So you cracked the code, in other words.

JULIE THORPE: Yes, Exactly. So that wasn't really our goal. Our goal was just a test to see whether or not our model was effective and our ultimate goal is to try to use this model in order to encourage people to create stronger passwords. So in order to tell people when their passwords are weak and maybe suggest other options for them.

LL: Well, it is illuminating. And I'm wondering Christopher Collins, have you shared this model publicly?

CHRISTOPHER COLLINS: We have. We've made our code and our model available for research purposes so that other people can expand upon it and use it in ways that might help us as a community come up with better ways to secure our computer system.

LL: But isn't that dangerous? Can't other people use that now?

CHRISTOPHER COLLINS: Yeah. I mean it could be dangerous I think. But you know if we’re publishing this work and we're able to do it, who knows who else is able to do it and they're not publishing about it? So I think it's better for us to know what's possible and what we can find in these publicly available data sets so that we can protect ourselves against those kind of attacks.

LL: Julie Thorpe, just this very quickly: how can what you've learned help us make our passwords better?

JULIE THORPE: So I guess there are a few things that we could say is that try to avoid common patterns in the way that you would normally speak. So if you are creating a password that has more than one word, maybe try to mix it up in a different way so that it doesn't kind of flow with natural language like the way that we would normally speak. Maybe try to avoid common categories like the word love and also names, places, money, food, animals that are cute. Those kind of things that we mentioned earlier are good things to try to avoid.

LL: That's good advice and thanks to both of you for sharing the information with us.

CHRISTOPHER COLLINS: Thank you very much.

JULIE THORPE: You’re welcome.

LL: Julie Thorpe and Christopher Collins are professors at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario. Lorrie Faith Cranor, back to you. What do you think? Can we make passwords better to the point where they do become fully secure?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: No, I don't think we'll ever have full security. I think we can do a lot better than we're currently doing, but it's not going to be perfect.

LL: Well then, we heard about the race to replace passwords with biometric options. What do you think of those?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: I think there are a lot of really promising new ideas in passwords or password replacements that are coming along. I think as of today, we don't really have a good alternative that's going to work for everything. You know the fingerprint reader works okay for a phone but it's not super secure as it's implemented today. But hopefully these things will get better over time.

LL: What about this idea of heart beats, heart rhythms?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Yeah, that's a great idea. I will be really interested to see how that ends up working out in practice.

LL: Now Bill Gates was predicting as long ago as 2004 that the password was dead and yet it is still here, still with us. Why?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Because we don't really have a good replacement at the moment. You know if you make a list of what are all the things you want in a good password system and then you look at all of these new systems that are on the market and available today, they all fall short in one dimension or another. Many of them are expensive. They don't work on existing computer devices. They require some special hardware. Maybe they're not as secure. Maybe they can't be used by people with disabilities, blind people, deaf people. There's all sorts of problems with them. Now that said, some of them are very suitable for some applications even today. But there isn't a solution that we can say this should just completely replace all passwords now.

LL: Okay. So you don't see a day when a password disappears altogether.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: That may happen. It's not this week and probably not this year.

LL: You sound doubtful.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: But never say never. I hope that someday passwords will disappear but it's not immediately.

LL: Okay. In the meantime, what are your tips for keeping our data and our money and our pictures secure?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Yeah. Well, so individual users should pick strong passwords and they should not re-use the same password over and over again. And so to do that, they either have to have really good memory or they need to write their password down or use a password manager. And so I do encourage people to you know choose unique passwords, write them down in a safe place—not on a Post-it note on your computer—or use a password manager to store your passwords.

LL: Are you following your own advice?

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: I do use a password manager, yes. I would not be able to remember them otherwise.

LL: I've actually read that some people suggest you write it down and lock it away in a safe. Seems a bit extreme.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: Yeah, that can work as long as that safe is somewhere that you can access it when you need it. You know locking it in your desk drawer somewhere like that might be sufficient.

LL: Okay, Lorrie. Thank you very much.

LORRIE FAITH CRANOR: You're welcome.

LL: Lorrie Faith Cranor is professor of computer science and engineering as well as the director of the privacy and security lab at Carnegie Mellon University. She's also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, a company that does security training including for passwords. She doesn't work for them anymore but she does remain a shareholder. And she was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Well, that is our program for today. You can stay tuned now to Radio One for q. Tom Power welcomes the American indie folk singer, John Darnielle. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the free CBC Radio app from the App Store or Google Play. Now after our discussion about the future of passwords, let's end things off with a little humour. This is comedian Don Friesen on the all-too-familiar experience of forgetting your password. I'm Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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My kids think I'm an old man because I can never remember anything. But it’s because my brain is full of passwords and fragments of passwords you know, because every site’s got different rules. You know you've got to have two Ps and an upside down Q. Okay. And then a number and a capital and a symbol. Okay. And don’t write it down. No, no. I got it up here. A number, symbol, capital.

[Sound: Laughter]

They give you the worst advice. Just name it after a childhood pet. Oh, that would be great if I ever had a dog named P3_YQ055.

[Sound: Applause and laughter]

The neighbours would think you're nuts. Here P-three-underscore-capital I. Who’s my little underscore? So I can never remember the password. First thing I look for on every page is forgot password. Click. I don’t even guess. No waiting, no guessing. Just boom, I’m there. I pre-forgot. They’re like we’ll help you retrieve your password. What's your username? Aww…

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February 13, 2017 full episode transcript

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