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The Current Transcript for February 28, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

There was a concerted and sustained effort to attempt to politically interfere with my role as the attorney general. I did not let that happen.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She was blunt and she was devastating. Jody Wilson-Raybould detailed the names, dates, conversations, text messages as she outlined what she characterized as a consistent and sustained effort, a political interference over a pending criminal prosecution of SNC Lavalin. She spoke of veiled threats and said as Attorney General she made it clear several times that adverts coming from the finance minister's office, the PMO and the Privy Council were inappropriate and she wanted them stopped. In just a moment were looking at the consequences of what her testimony has exposed. And while the Commons justice committee took notes in Ottawa, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform was taking shots at the witness it had on the stand in Washington. Michael Cohen already facing jail time for what he's called his dirty deeds for US President Donald Trump, warn his detractors that they were becoming what he already was.

SOUNDCLIP

I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years. I can only warn people the more people follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the consequences that I'm suffering.

AMT: We will dissect the implications of that testimony in half an hour and in an hour. Remember Pokemon Go? You thought it was just a crazy game, right?

SOUNDCLIP

Finding creatures, growing up levels and so forth. It was using those incentives to herd game players to specific places.

AMT: Pokemon Go's real success was in what it revealed about predictive behavior. It's just one example of what Shoshana's Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism; turning our personal experiences into a valuable commodity without our knowledge. She says if you follow the threads of what the big tech firms are doing with your data you will see it has the potential to unravel democracy. Hmm a lot about democracy today. I mean how Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Liberals will look to 'shed doubt' on Jody Wilson-Raybould's testimony: reporter

Guests: Kady O’Malley, Martin Patriquin, Chris Hall

SOUNDCLIP

For a period of approximately four months, between September and December of 2018, I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in my role as the attorney general of Canada, in an inappropriate effort to secure a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC Lavalin.

AMT: That was just the beginning for Jody Wilson-Raybould. For nearly four hours yesterday in front of the House of Commons justice committee, the former Attorney General and Minister of Justice told Canadians her side of the story, a story about alleged pressure from The Prime Minister's office on the SNC Lavalin file and she pulled no punches. After her testimony the opposition leader Andrew Scheer was calling for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's resignation and The Prime Minister was on the defensive.

SOUNDCLIP

I strongly maintained as I have from the beginning that I and my staff always acted appropriately and professionally and therefore I completely disagree with the characterization of the former attorney general about these events.

AMT: We have a panel ready to look at all of this. Chris Hall is the national affairs editor for CBC News he's host of the house. Kady O'Malley is a freelance Parliamentary correspondent with iPolitics. They're both in Ottawa. And joining us from Montreal is iPolitics and Montreal Gazette columnist Martin Patriquin. Hello to all of you.

GUESTS: Good morning. Hello there.

AMT: Chris let's start with you. What were you thinking as Jody Wilson-Raybould testimony was unfolding?

CHRIS HALL: I was thinking that this was one of the most dramatic moments I've witnessed in my time on Parliament Hill. She came across as organised. She came across as having a great memory. She talked about being a copious note taker. And there wasn't malice in anything she said. It was almost a resignation as she went through detail after detail, meeting after meeting over the course of four months in 2018 about how she was pressured really relentlessly by various people, very important people inside the government to politically interfere in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin starting with The Prime Minister, the Privy Council Michael Warnick, the top two staffers in his office. It was quite extraordinary and I think I was struck at the end, Anna Maria, by the fact that liberal MP in that committee went after her, challenged her, talked about why she hadn't resigned back in the fall, while opposition MPs uniformly said they trusted her, they believed her and praised her courage for coming forward. It was quite the performance.

AMT: Chris did we know about the finance department in all of this? Mr. Morneau's name hasn't come up that often.

CHRIS HALL: No they were lobbied extensively by SNC Lavalin during that period in the fall of 2018, both Ben Chin the chief of staff to Bill Morneau and Bill Morneau himself. Ben Chin was the one that she mentioned most frequently of the two in terms of calling her or her own chief of staff to try and get her to intervene warning of the political consequences, warning of SNC Lavalin pulling out of Montreal, the lost jobs. That might have been enough. That would have been fine actually Anna Maria it was a question of when it became, there's an election under way. You know my seat, said The Prime Minister, is in Papineau which is in Quebec. These are the issues are things that really went over the line and will have people talking about this for days and weeks ahead.

AMT: Martin what are your thoughts?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: You know we're going to digest and dissect her testimony for weeks for days and weeks. We're doing it right now. But I think it's worth looking at the sort of spectacle, the larger spectacle of Wilson-Raybould herself. You know if you go back to 2015 Trudeau was elected in large part to be what Harper was, Stephen Harper wasn't, you know pro indigenous, pro feminist, utterly open. And so within moments of her opening statement we had a female indigenous woman who had basically punched a hole and every single one of those conceits. She'd demonstrated that the PMO was a top down arbitrary sort of controlling entity that is willing to bend the rules for personal gain, in short exactly what the criticise Stephen Harper for back in the day.

AMT: Kady she may then Nixonian Watergate reference. She said that at one point she had thought of the Saturday Night Massacre which is when Richard Nixon ordered his Attorney General to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. The attorney general refusers and resigns. The deputy attorney general refuses and resigns. He has to go through three people before he gets what he wants. What do you make of that reference?

KADY O'MALLEY: I think that was obviously the culmination after he went through this lengthy campaign pressure and badgering. I mean really- And I just have to [unintelligible] here, one thing but in addition to everything that Chris and Marty have said about being boggled by allegations. I also, wearing my journalistic hat, kind of felt a sense of relief that finally we were getting details, we were getting names, we were getting dates and getting times. We were getting things that can be kind of put out there and analyzed and parsed and on the record. It just feels like it really opened up the story and kind of took it to a new level. We're no wonder you constantly were to say, you know as alleged by unnamed sources in the Globe and Mail. We can now say as alleged by the former Attorney General in exquisite detail at a House committee, under parliamentary privilege. That was to me a huge relief because now we can actually start to put the pieces together and assemble what was happening. But, yes, it sounds to me - from the Attorney General perspective - she went through this kind of barraging of staffers trying to get you know badgering her to change her mind. And finally she you know eventually gets this call from the Court in which it becomes clear, at least from her perspective, that she's being given a pretty stark choice. So I think it was an apt illusion, an apt [unintelligible] historic illusion for her to make in that particular context.

AMT: I want to play another clip for you. This is her describing a September 17th meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau and Michael Warnick, the clerk of the Privy Council.

SOUNDCLIP

At that point the Prime Minister jumped in stressing that there is an election in Quebec and that quote "I am an MP in Quebec, the Member for Papineau" end quote. I was quite taken aback. My response and I vividly remember this is to ask the prime minister a direct question well looking him in the eye. I asked, quote, "Are you politically interfering with my role my decision as the attorney general. I would strongly advise against it." End quote. The prime minister said no no no. We just need to find a solution.

AMT: Martin what does this tell us about the political significance of SNC to the Liberal Party especially in Quebec?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: Huge on one hand because you know SNC Lavalin is a very very big player, the biggest engineering firm or one of the biggest in the country, certainly the biggest Quebec. And you know also let's not forget a fairly large donor to the Liberal Party, to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars in donations that were deemed illegal later. The thing about this though is that if it's there if the PMO and Justin Trudeau's worry was that this was somehow the SNC stuff was somehow going to affect the October election in Quebec. It was utterly misplaced. I went over it last night. I tried to find references during the election, during the run up in the campaign, anything that SNC Lavalin, they're worried about losing jobs etc etc. there were none. We ran an election on health care, education, the economy and identity issues. There was nothing about SNC Lavalin. The other thing too is you got to remember they really concentrated on SNC Lavalin being a Quebec entity and being worried about it being a Quebec thing. That again is misplaced. You know SNC Lavalin it might be based in Quebec but they have 9,000 employees across yeah the vast majority of which are outside of Quebec. Losing SNC Lavalin they wouldn't just hurt Quebec. It would hurt the entire country.

AMT: Well but you know also, were they assuming it was guilty? If it was charged it would be innocent until proven guilty. Are suggesting it would have been found guilty?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: That seems evident. I mean look at the public prosecutor's office had been working on this for four years or by that time about three and half years from 2015 on. They felt that they had a very good case. One of the proof is in the pudding a little bit in that they refused to give SNC Lavalin a DPA a deferred prosecution agreement in part because they feel they didn't they didn't meet the criteria. They were very very bullish on going ahead with these charges.

AMT: So it's hard not to know that her replacement David Lametti is from Montreal.

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: It is very very-- and it's also important to note that Mr. Lametti isn't known for his independence of thought [over talking].

CHRIS HALL: One of the things that segment you just played of Jody Wilson-Raybould is significant for another reason. In Vancouver the Prime Minister had told reporters waiting for him that he had talked to Jody Wilson-Raybould twice over that course of that weekend, this was just a few weeks ago. And he said she had confirmed for him that he had told her that it was her decision and hers alone to make. Now we have a completely contrasting view here that he brought it up not her and she was the one who asked him whether he was directing her. There was always an interesting context of who said what about this. How did it come up. But the other thing is that I think the real danger here is that Justin Trudeau has said throughout, whether it's [unintelligible] extradition, whether it this case that this was a party in a government that respects the rule of law and democratic institutions. It is clear from what Jody Wilson-Raybould had to say, that that is not the case in her mind anyway, and the people who support her would agree with that.

AMT: Let me pick up on this because those are two really good points. So the prime minister has said she could have just told me. Did that tell us yesterday that she not only told him, she told the finance department, she told the PMO, she told the Privy Council all of us?

CHRIS HALL: She said it had to stop. She told that to Bill Morneau. She told that to Gerry Butts and Katie. She recently told that through several times. But whether it's clear you know this is this is the grey area I might be. She didn't threaten to resign as liberals ask. She does apparently have had a record. She wasn't sure she had notes of those conversations. But in the end you know balancing what one person says against the other, she came across, as I started off with this, she came across to sound like she really remember well what had happen and she has copious notes. We'll see what they are.

AMT: Kady go ahead.

KADY O'MALLEY: I have a slightly different interpretation than Chris, only because to me what kind of [unintelligible] from her account was that was she really trying to make it very clear to the Prime Minister to the Privy Council, to all of these people who kept coming after her, saying, hey here's why you might want to reconsider the DPA. Aren't these great arguments, etc, etc. She was saying the decision is done, out of my way and it's over. Please stop harassing me about this. That was the message that she was giving them. And she was you know understandably kind of frustrated that they [unintelligible]. At the time you get the sense that the Prime Minister and the government in general approached it as long as we don't actually tell her what to do, we're staying on the right side of [unintelligible] and were staying within their rule of law. So it was as if they were trying to find any way to kind of slide around those restrictions on a technicality, so they could always turn back and say, oh, no no no, we always said it was her decision, while you know keeping up this constant campaign. And again that is where it becomes the grey, because they didn't actually force to make the decision, or force her to resign. They just came that close, like they thought they would come up with the magic argument to convince her and sees it their way.

AMT: Go ahead Martin.

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: And that's the interesting thing about her testimony. She was asked later on in her testimony and she made the statement. She made the statement throughout the time that this was completely inappropriate, the pressure that was being put on her. She was asked specifically if it was legal. She said it was not illegal but it was inappropriate.

AMT: Let me just quote Mr. Cohen in Washington testifying at the same time when he says Mr. Trump didn't tell me directly to lie. That's not how he operates. And I kind of that's- Do you see a parallel?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: Look the PMO doesn't have to give directions, they're like that considered area. That analogy here on these very airwaves a couple weeks ago. They don't they don't push. They suggest. I mean that quote that Wernicke read out again, the Clerk of the council said, I think - meaning Trudeau - is going to find a way to get it done one way or another. So he is in that kind of mood and I want you to be aware of that.

AMT: So if you are a Huawei executive or if you are in the government of China and you listen to Jody Wilson-Raybould what do you think of the fact that the prime minister and the Foreign Affairs Minister kept insisting keep insisting that the rule of law is what Canada Follows?

CHRIS HALL: As Martin pointed out there is no suggestion from Jody Wilson-Raybould that it was illegal. This was more around using the powers of persuasion, the veiled threat that 'perhaps will find someone else to do this job if you don’t follow through' certainly suggests that when its when its a convenient, when there's a political reason for the government to act, that the adherence, the strict adherence to the appearance of transparency and openness and rule of law is something that could be negotiated.

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: The other thing I want to bring up to Chris's earlier point was you know talking about the rule of law. I would remind people that again court of the Privy Council Michael Warnick prefaced a lot of his testimony do with him being worried about the erosion of trust in governance here in Canada. That statement takes on a whole different light, in the wake of what Mrs. Wilson-Raybould said yesterday.

AMT: Okay well let’s keep moving. Again a lot of other names came up. Would expect Kady, do you expect to see any other resignations? Gerard Butts has gone. You see anybody else needing to resign this morning?

KADY O'MALLEY: I am not sure if I expect anyone to resign this morning. My suspicion is that right now the prime minister's office is obviously in crisis mode. I suspect it's his initial response was to come out and say they can disagree with the characterization. They are now working overtime to try to come up with some evidence that we corroborate an alternative narrative. It's a very delicate line they have to work because clearly at least as of last night they're not willing to- They're still willing to challenge her credibility in terms of suggestions that she may be not you know giving the whole truth. They want to [unintelligible] out about the way she's characterizing it. So the only way realistically that they could ever manage to do that is if they can come up with a compelling competing argument that seems equally convincing. And also this is important - have some documentary evidence to back it up as she did with her notes. I suspect what they're going to do with you know before making anyone else off the plank. They're probably going to figure out if they can put that kind of narrative forward and then figure out what the implications are. I don't see any strategic benefit and just do enough for both the clearing of the house like today in terms of the office staff, but you know that's definitely something that could happen down the line. But right now I think they're trying to figure out do they have a defence and they can [unintelligible]. And if they do or id they think they do, they're not going to want to talk people overboard because that just makes them look guilty.

AMT: Okay let's play one more clip here. This is this is again, this is a question from Liberal MP Randy Boisineau.

SOUNDCLIP

MP: The oath that you took on June 14th reaffirmed your confidence in the government. Do you have confidence in the prime minister today?

JWR: I'll say this and I'm not going to get into any conversations about why I resigned other than to say this. I resigned from Cabinet because I did not have confidence to sit around the table, the cabinet table. That's why I resigned.

AMT: Martin when you make for that?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: A direct shot at what Mr. Trudeau said not 24 hours before she resigned. That is to say that Trudeau said that Miss Wilson-Raybould had confidence in the government and proof in the pudding was the fact that she was still sitting at the cabinet table. This is a shot across the bow to that.

AMT: So we have heard Mr. Trudeau last night and speak to this. Chris Hall what haven't you heard? What do you want to ask?

CHRIS HALL: A couple of things. Firstly all putting to him the precise allegations she made announced at the meeting of September 17th. This whole question about whether she being directed to have him go over that. I think we need to hear from Gerald Butt now who resigned saying he did nothing wrong but was becoming a distraction to the government. There are allegations about what he said and his role in all this. I think people would want to know whether Gerard Butts is going to be prepared to testify and I don't think the prime minister can escape the question of whether he himself is prepared to appear before a committee and to respond to specific questions that have been raised now by Jody Wilson-Raybould and whether as Kady mentioned, what kind of documentation exists that would rebut what she has to say.

AMT: Kady what do you want to hear?

KADY O'MALLEY: Well in general all of the things that Chris just mentioned as well as in terms of the prime minister's and also from I guess that side of this debate, yes I'd like hear their alternate narrative. I would love and I'm not sure what kind of the role of this particular political aspect of this controversy. I'd like to know why - let's just for a moment think that the prime minister and his advisers genuinely believed that the right approach her was a DPA, not for creepy sinister reasons, but they genuinely believed that it was a mistake legally not to offer one. Why not have that debate in a more public form?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: That's a good question.

KADY O'MALLEY: Why do you do it in side meetings and you know trying to browbeat the attorney general staff? Why not actually had that conversation? If you're confident in your views and if you're confident in your position on how a particular case should proceed, why not be more open about it and figure a way you do it so it doesn't look like you're going to be trying to [cross talking]. I'd like to know that.

AMT: We're almost out of time here. Martin what message does this send to other big corporations in Canada?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: Don't ask the PM over any favours basically.

AMT: Or? I mean they went going to bat for SNC.

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: They were going to bat and they got caught and they happened to have someone in position who--.

AMT: A lot of people out of jobs in Alberta who want them to go to bat for them.

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: Right. I don’t know how you'd do that without political interference at this point.

AMT: There is a court case that's holding up a Trans Mountain pipeline. I mean are people going to make these connections regardless of whether they're conflating?

MARTIN PATRIQUIN: The one thing I would say is, as regards to the PMO, is that in the case of SNC Lavalin, they lobbied for this for a year and half. They got to put it in the box and in the end they got caught.

AMT: There is the sound of the music. We've got to go. Chris Hall, Kady O'Malley, Martin Patriquin thanks for your insight.

GUESTS: Thanks very much. Thanks Anna Maria.

AMT: Stay With us. We're talking about the testimony in the U.S. next. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Michael Cohen's testimony alone not enough to indict Trump, says expert

Guests: Anthony Gaughan, David Cay Johnston, Emma Loop

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, George Orwell's cautionary tale about Big Brother watching you may feel rather quaint compared to the role big tech is playing in our lives. Harvard Business School scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism and you may be shocked at the way she describes how the technology we live with is actually shaping our behaviors. She's my guest in about half an hour. But first Michael Cohen sings the hits.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE 1: Mr. Cohen you're a disgraced lawyer, I mean, you've been disbarred. You're a pathological liar. You don't know truth from falsehood.

MR. COHEN: Sir, I'm sorry, are you referring to me or the President?

VOICE 1: Hey! This is my time!

VOICE 2: We are supposed to take what you say Mr. Cohen, at this time, about Mr. Trump as the truth. But you're about to go to prison for lying. How can we believe anything you say? The answer is we can't.

MR. COHEN: I've always tried to be a good person. I've tried to be a great friend. I have friends that I treat incredibly well that I've known for over 40 years. And I treat people after 40 minutes the same exact way.

VOICE 2: Is there a love child?

MR. COHEN: There is not, to the best of my knowledge.

VOICE 2: So you would have us believe that you would pay off someone ...

MR. COHEN: It wasn't me, ma'am. It was AMI. It was David Pecker.

VOICE 2: So he paid off someone about a love child that doesn't exist?

MR. COHEN: Correct.

AMT: Some of the more surreal comments from Michael Cohen's big day yesterday before the House Oversight Committee and the US Congress. President Donald Trump's former lawyer and so-called fixer will be back on Capitol Hill today for more testimony before another committee. But yesterday's session was the only one open to the public and it had its fair share of shocking moments, from testimony that Donald Trump knew in advance about the 2016 Democratic National Committee e-mail leak, to testimony about covering up The President's grades.

SOUNDCLIP

When I say con-man, I'm talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT two scores.

AMT: Well the U.S. president responded as he left his Hanoi meeting with the leader of North Korea.

SOUNDCLIP

He lied a lot, but it was very interesting because he didn't lie about one thing. He said no collusion with the Russian hoax. A little impressed by that frankly you've got to go all out. He only won about 95 percent instead of 100 percent. But the fact is there is no collusion.

AMT: Well from the very wide ranging testimony of Michael Cohen and how it's all playing out, I'm joined by someone who was in the room. Emma Loop is a Capitol Hill reporter for BuzzFeed and she joins us from our studios in Washington. Hi.

EMMA LOOP: Good morning.

AMT: What was it like in the hearing room when Michael Cohen got there?

EMMA LOOP: You know all eyes were fixed on him. It's a fairly small hearing room compared to some of the other hearing rooms on the Senate side of the Capitol. But there were still you know tons of people in there and just a mountain of photographers and videographers in front of the table where he would be sitting, taking photos, trying to get that perfect shot of him walking in. And so it got pretty quiet other than the you know the clicking of the cameras when he walked in, and then he sat down and you know the show began. The real key to me was actually outside the room because you had this giant line of cameras, of reporters kind of up against the wall, just waiting for any member or any person to come out and you know get comment on what they thought was happening. And so outside it was kind of chaos. You also had this giant line of members of the public staffers trying to get a seat within the hearing room. So this line of people is kind of all the way down the hallway. So outside it was pretty hectic. Inside it was hectic but not quite as crazy as outside.

AMT: And pretty biting of course.

EMMA LOOP: Yes.

AMT: So how do you think he came across in his testimony overall?

EMMA LOOP: You know I think he came across as fairly confident and he was able to effectively push back at some of the narratives that the Republicans were trying to push. He came out immediately and said I have lied a lot. I have done a lot of bad things. I am trying to repent for my sins and I'm going to jail. I'm paying the ultimate price for what I have done. I take responsibility for that. And so when Republicans then followed up with, well, you know how can we trust you you're going to jail and kind of repeating what he had already admitted to, it didn't seem quite as effective as I think they hoped it would be.

AMT: So he had anticipated that.

EMMA LOOP: Yes he was obviously very well prepared and you know he was able to kind of push back as well as some zingers here and there against these allegations from the Republican side. You know at one point one of the Republican members said - was trying to grill him about his source of income - and said, well what's your source of income going to be. And Cohen said, well I'm going to a federal penitentiary. I don't think I'm going to have a source of income behind bars.

AMT: And will play some of that later, but before we get there, what were the most significant revelations in your mind?

EMMA LOOP: You know it's really hard to pick because there was so much, but I think some of the revelations around Trump- Moscow, the effort to build this giant skyscraper in Moscow during the presidential campaign were really important. For instance you know Cohen says that he met with the president before he delivered his false testimony to Congress a back a couple years ago. And basically Trump was sort of instructing him on what to say, basically tell them there's no Russian collusion, there's no- there's no anything, there's no business deal, nothing. And that is something that Rudy Giuliani - Trump's current lawyer - has said never happened and so that's a pretty strong allegation especially if you consider that Cohen was charged with lying to Congress. It's one of the reasons he's going to jail.

AMT: And in fact I have a clip here that speaks to that. This is this is Cohen discussing his lies to Congress about Mr. Trump's business dealings with Russia and whether he was directed to do that, to lie. Here it is.

SOUNDCLIP

Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That's not how he operates. In conversation we had during the campaign at the same time I was actively negotiating in Russia for him, he would look me in the eye and tell me there is no Russian business and then go on to lie to the American people. In his way, he was telling me to lie.

AMT: Emma Loop, two of your colleagues at BuzzFeed had an explosive story earlier this year that said Donald Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. Did that testimony, the wording of that testimony yesterday, support your refute?

EMMA LOOP: We believe that this reaffirms our reporting. You know I think there's a difference between the word directly and directed. Others have since reported that Cohen felt that he was directed to lie indirectly. So Trump didn't come out and say please go do crimes for me, please go [unintelligible] Congress for me. But it was very clear to Cohen through his actions, through his words, through his lying to the American public that he wanted him to lie. And so we do feel that this reaffirms what we've reported. And also other elements of that story whether it's the fact that Trump was briefed 10 times by Cohen on the discussions about the deal during the presidential campaign while he was saying that there is nothing going on in Russia. You know that part of our story has been confirmed by Cohen in this public setting and as well as other parts. You know saying that Ivanka and Don Junior, the Trump children, were also briefed regularly on this. This is something that they've denied as well. And so you know several elements of what we have reported here have borne out as have other stories that we've done and so we're confident in our reporting here.

AMT: Okay I want to bring in two more guests David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who's been covering Donald Trump for three decades. He's in our New York studio. Anthony Gaughan is a law professor at Drake University. He joins us from Des Moines, Iowa. Hello gentlemen welcome.

ANTHONY GAUGHAN: Hello.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Thank you.

AMT: David Cay Johnston What is your overall reaction to the testimony you heard from Michael Cohen yesterday?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well Michael laid out by my count at least 10 criminal actions involving Donald Trump and provided some documentary support for this. He gave us indications of things that I have written about in the past, in the 30 years I've covered Donald: tax fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, insurance fraud, suborning perjury. And these contacts with the Russians, it is a criminal act. You have states to allow or accept anything from a foreign government in a federal action. I think Cohen made it quite clear that his testimony along with all the other evidence that that is exactly what went on. But it was done through subordinates in the same way that Donald Trump talks in code as all crime bosses do. And that's what Donald Trump is. He's a white collar third generation head of a white collar crime family.

AMT: Anthony Gaughan, what stood out for you in all of what he said?

ANTHONY GAUGHAN: Well certainly Anna Maria. I think it's true that everything that Michael Cohen testified regarding yesterday he was personally damaging and politically damaging for Donald Trump. And if subsequently corroborated would be legally damaging but nothing that he actually said on its own terms would be sufficient to support a criminal indictment, let alone a conviction because of two problems. First, Cohen is not a credible witness because of the fact that he was previously found -- previously pled guilty to having lied to Congress. And although I personally think he told the truth yesterday, I don't think any prosecutor would rely on Cohen as a star witness, particularly when you're talking about bringing charges against people close to The President, or even The President. And secondly, the special counsel Robert Mueller is working under Justice Department regulations that maintain that you cannot indict a sitting president, which means that, ultimately, this is up to the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to decide whether there is enough evidence against the president to justify his impeachment, and then his subsequent removal in a Senate trial.

AMT: What's your view on that?

ANTHONY GAUGHAN: I don't think we heard enough yesterday to get us to a point where the Senate would actually remove Trump. Here is the bottom line: the Democrats control the House, and you just need a simple majority to impeach a president. But to remove a president, you need a two-thirds super majority vote in the U.S. Senate, and Republicans control the Senate, and it was quite clear from the very partisan approach that the Republican minority took in yesterday's hearing that they are not persuaded that there is enough evidence to convince them to abandon their support for Donald Trump. So I think where things stand right now is that we gained additional details about how Trump operates, but not enough to support a criminal indictment or an impeachment proceeding.

AMT: Just to be clear because we saw this with Bill Clinton's presidency, so you can be an impeached president but you're not necessarily going to be a removed President because the Senate gets the final say.

ANTHONY GAUGHAN: Exactly right.

AMT: I want to go back to the issue of credibility and Emma touched on this but we've got the clip. I'll play it. This is this is the senators hammering away at Mr. Cohen's credibility and this is his exchange with Republican Congressman Jim Jordan.

SOUNDCLIP

JIM JORDAN: His remorse is non-existent. He just debated a member of Congress saying I really didn't do anything wrong with the false bank things that I'm guilty of and gone to prison for.

MR. COHEN: Mr. Jordan, that's not what I said and you know that that's not what I said.

[Cross talking].

MR. COHEN: I plead guilty and I take responsibility for my actions. Shame on you Mr. Jordan. That's not what I said. Shame on you.

JIM JORDAN: Mr. Chairman--.

MR. COHEN: That's not what I said what I said is I took responsibility and I take responsibility and I am going to resign. I will away from my wife and family for years.

AMT: So Emma he anticipated that. How do you think that plays off outside the Beltway?

EMMA LOOP: You know I think it plays off pretty well. I do think that a lot of people coming away from that hearing felt that Cohen seemed fairly credible. One thing that Democrats brought up during the hearing was, yes he has a massive credibility issue but he's already going away to jail. What does he have to gain now by lying to us yet again. You know eventually people are going to find out whether he lied or not, if he did lie. And even Chairman Cummings said, I told Mr. Cohen before this hearing that if he lied today I wouldn't nail him to the cross. And so there didn't really seem to be a big impetus for Cohen to lie again to Congress. And he made that clear too.

AMT: David Cay Johnston, what do you think of the credibility issue?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well we use people who lie as prime witnesses to convict people all the time including even hit men, as Rudy Giuliani did in New York. So you certainly have to work to rehabilitate a witness and to properly examine them. During the hearings yesterday, the Democrats did a very poor job of connecting the dots. They didn't I think make a lot clearer that this is the beginning of a process in which a whole series of witnesses are going to be called to get the public to understand who Donald Trump is through a number of such hearings. On the other hand you know the Republicans didn't want to try to challenge the actual underlying facts. Was there payments to Stormy Daniels? Did those violate federal election rules in the United States? They only tried to attack Michael Cohen. How this plays with the public I think is very uncertain. Keep in mind that in America the 90 percent who are worse off today than they were back in the mid-1960s a lot of them are very angry and they see Donald Trump mad as a demagogue but as a dema-god.

AMT: Well you know he also spoke about racism. There are some pretty pretty stark quotes about how he he referred to African-Americans.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: And Anna Maria, you know Donald has been the subject of judicial proceedings that have established his discrimination against blacks, women, Asians and Puerto Ricans just as he's had two income tax fraud trials both of which he lost.

AMT: Anthony Gaughan, the polarization we have seen in the United States over Donald Trump, does this just reinforce each side's view of things do you think?

ANTHONY GAUGHAN: Yes I think it does because there have been many other revelations over the last three years that I think most observers, including myself, thought would be lethal to dialogue Trump. He really has been a teflon president, before that a teflon candidate when it comes to the Republican base. They have stuck by him through thick and thin and I haven't seen anything yet that would indicate there will be a significant erosion of their support for him. Now that said the most important investigation is not that the House Oversight Committees investigation. It's Robert molders the special counsel investigation, and it's the ongoing investigation in New York State by the New York attorney general and by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office into potential state crimes committed by the Trump organization. It's important to note that under the Constitution the president has the power to pardon federal crimes but he can pardon state crimes. And so if criminal wrongdoing is established, under New York state law Donald Trump will be powerless to prevent those investigations from leading to criminal charges. Now he'll argue that as president you can't engage the sitting president. We don't have a Supreme Court ruling on that so we don't actually know how the quote we come down on that, but certainly he would now be able to pardon anyone who is invaded by New York state prosecutors.

AMT: Emma, you've been following the Mueller investigation and everything coming out of all of the actions around that. How do you see what happened yesterday with Mr. Cohen fitting into that, because that investigation is going to have a report coming out soon is, it not?

EMMA LOOP: That's what the reports have said that Mueller's is wrapping up and it certainly seems like he is closer to the and then he has to the beginning but it's not really clear what he is up to because he's so secretive and he's very good at preventing leaks from his team. But I think that you know Cohen has been an important piece of Mueller’s investigation. We know that based off of the court documents you know Cohen himself was careful yesterday not to talk too much about things that might be still sensitive and relevant to ongoing investigations. He actually mentioned there was another potential crime that The President was implicated and that he couldn't explain in any more detail because he says it's still under investigation. And so I think there's definitely more to come with this investigation. And we just don't have good visibility in general in terms of the entire media. You know we've been able to do some reporting on this, but it's a very secretive team that's running this investigation. So we'll see.

AMT: I have another clip and this goes to Donald Trump's view of the presidency. And let's just listen.

SOUNDCLIP

Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation, only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr. Trump Would often say this campaign was going to be the greatest infomercial in political history.

AMT: David Cay Johnston, you've been following Donald Trump for a long time, is that plausible?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Pretty much. I mean Donald has been fantasizing about being president since 1987. He made a brief run in 2000 and said he was going to be the first candidate to turn a profit off running for president. Well overwhelmingly his motive here was money and he clearly did not expect to win, but Donald has dreamed and fantasised about this because in his own mind Darnel believes he is superior. He has talked about his theory that the trumps are genetically superior to the rest of us. And that's why you hear and call anybody who he doesn't get along with a fool or an idiot. If he were poor we would say he's crazy but in America of course we say rich people are eccentric, but Donald is very delusional about his capabilities including his claim that he is the world's greatest expert in 22 subjects.

AMT: Speaking of eccentricities, Michael Cohen said he heard Donald Trump on the phone with another adviser, Roger Stone, discussing WikiLeaks release of the Democratic National Committee emails ahead of the election before these Wikileaks released these documents. How significant is that, David?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: I think that's incredibly significant. The what I'm hearing I think is very clear. The Kremlin through its agent WikiLeaks and Donald through his agent Roger Ashtown set out to allow the Kremlin to interfere in the American election, which is in itself a crime as well as a high crime in misdemeanor impeachable offense. Although as Professor Guaghan pointed out there are no votes in the Senate to convict him. There's more that will come out about this. Roger Stone who is a self-described hedonist as not known as one would die in prison. He's 66 years old and freesking, if convicted, very long time in prison. One of the things we might get are intercepts. American, British, Netherlands, Australian intelligence agencies almost certainly have intercepts that the old with WikiLeaks and Roger Stone. Because they are concerned about sources and methods they might not be released, but I don't think there's any doubt that the Kremlin was working cooperatively with the Trump people. After all Don Junior wrote an email expressing joy and welcoming the Kremlin providing Hillary Clinton which the only thing to do, if you're an American and a foreign government offers you [unintelligible] the campaign on your opponent, is to pick up the phone, call the FBI and say hi I need to speak to someone in counterintelligence. That would never occur to The Trumps.

AMT: So Mr. Trump left Hanoi today, Emma Loop. He was tweeting I got a tweet here: "Michael Cohen was one of many lawyers who represented me, unfortunately. He had other clients also. He was also disbarred from the state supreme court for lying and fraud. He did bad things unrelated to Trump. He is lying in order to reduce his prison time using crooked lawyer." What do you expect to hear when Mr. Trump lands?

EMMA LOOP: I think we're going to hear more of the same. I think there's a common refrain here from the Republican side and those who support Trump that you know we need to attack Michael Cohen's credibility and he does have a very legitimate credibility issue. You know federal prosecutors have pointed out as well you know and Cohen did do bad things that were unrelated to Trump. But again he has tried to at least repent for them. And so I think you know I think we'll see what happens next. But I think Trump is going to keep hammering away at that narrative.

AMT: And he Anthony Gaughan you are far from the activities inside the Beltway of Washington D.C. So you're hearing other things. What are going to be watching for next?

ANTHONY GAUGHAN: I think two people to keep an eye on at this point are, first, Robert Mueller. I fully expect that his work will include more information that we received from Michael Cohen, information that will be extremely damaging. So when that reporters file with the attorney general there will be a huge battle over how much of that is publicly released. And that's the first thing I'm looking into. Second, a name I think your viewers should keep in mind is a name they probably haven't heard which is Allan Weisselberg. He was the chief financial chief financial officer at the Trump organization. And ultimately, he is a vastly more important witness than Michael Cohen because he was deeply involved in all Trump's business dealings over the last 30 years. He is someone who potentially Congress could subpoenaed to testify. That's something to watch for in the weeks ahead.

AMT: We're going to leave it there. Thank you all of you. That's Emma Loop, Capitol Hill reporter for BuzzFeed News. She's in Washington D.C. David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist.. He's been covering Donald Trump for three decades. He's in our New York studio. Anthony Gaughan is a law professor at Drake University. He's in Des Moines, Iowa. Stay with us. Coming up in a few minutes. Who doesn't love all the great tech products we live with today. The only downside maybe that the real product is you. Shoshana Zuboff joins us to talk about what she calls surveillance capitalism right after the break. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti here listening to The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

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Businesses paid to have Pokemon Go players directed to their locations, says author

Guest: Shoshana Zuboff

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mom, Dad. Hey, Google, what's on the calendar today?

GOOGLE: You have one event called house to yourself.

VOICE 1: Oh yeah.

VOICE 2: Hey, Google, add aftershave to my shopping list.

VOICE 3: Hey, Google, remind me to clean sheets later.

GOOGLE: Okay. I'll remind you.

[Bell rings]

GOOGLE: Someone's at the front door.

VOICE 2: What do I owe you?

VOICE 4: Looks like you paid online.

VOICE 5: Keep the change you filthy animal.

VOICE 4: Okay. Cool.

[Music]

AMT: Well That is sound from the actor McCaulay Culkin reprising his role as the lovable little trouble maker Kevin McCallister from the Home Alone movies. He brought the character back there in an ad for the Google assistant. It's one of the new breed of gadgets people are inviting into their homes these days, ostensibly to help with your life from ordering pizza to plane the news. But as our lives become more entwined with smart technologies such as these, there's also a growing unease out there about what's ultimately happening to the reams of data were are generating in the process. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff has been looking to just that question and what she's found is eye opening. She says companies such as Google and Facebook are turning our everyday lives into commodities and selling them on to corporations with an interest in changing or predicting our behavior. Shoshana's Zuboff is a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School. Her new book is entitled The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and she joins us from Maine. Hello.

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Hello. It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Well I have so many questions for you but let's begin with that clip we just heard. In Home Alone, Kevin fought off burglars trying to break into his home. When people turn their houses into smart homes what's the parallel that you see?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well if the parallel is ot Home Alone, of course there is no story because we've just ceded all of that young boy's brilliance, creativity, courage and agency is extraordinary show of heroic autonomy and moral judgment that made that movie such a planetary hit. We ceded all of that to what? To a computational interface that is designed to collect data about us. Data that is then used in conjunction with machine intelligence to predict our future behavior, predictions that are then sold to other service and product providers, other businesses who have an interest in knowing what we will do. So, the big 'so what?' here is that we have eliminated the human story.

AMT: So what is the definition of surveillance capitalism?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: It is well known that capitalism has evolved over the centuries by taking things that live outside of the market dynamic, bringing those things into the marketplace, turning them into commodities that can be sold and purchased. Industrial capitalism claimed work for the market dynamic to be reborn as labor that could be assigned a wage and sold and purchased. Now we've fast forwarded to the 21st century. Surveillance capitalism emulates this pardon but it does so with a dark twist, and that twist is that it now claims private human experience as the next virgin wood. Private human experience is taken as the free source of raw material for translation into behavioral data. Those data - as we move through their pipe line of surveillance capitalism - those data are then converged with advanced computational capabilities, what we call artificial intelligence or machine intelligence. And the combination of data fed into these computational capabilities produce predictions and these are predictions of human behavior, predictions of what we will do now, soon and later. And it turns out that there are many business customers who have a vital interest in predicting our futures. And they from a very robust dynamic lucrative new marketplace that trades exclusively in behavioral futures. And that has become the crucible the new marketplace in which surveillance capitalism has become such a lucrative operation.

AMT: But you make the point that surveillance capitalism can't create value without taking our private experiences as it's data. It's taking our stuff.

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Yes it's taking our stuff. It's taking our daily lives. It's taking our bodies. It's taking location. It's taking what we do on our hoes as we saw in that clip of the remake of Home Alone. It's taking what we do in our automobiles. It's taking what we do in our cities, as the citizens of Toronto are facing today. And all of these now become just different levels of the supply chain for the behavioral data that is critical to supply the machines to produce the prediction.

AMT: When did we get into this era of surveillance capitalism?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: It was invented at Google in the teeth of the financial meltdown that we call the dot com bust in the years 2000-2001. That was anomen when the Google founders who had until that time really rejected online advertising in principle. They wrote publicly about the fact that online advertising would disfigure the online environment and very specifically disfigure the mechanisms of their search engine, because search would end up favoring the advertisements. But here they face financial emergency and this was an existential threat to their fledgling company because even their own are very glamorous elite venturous capitalists were threatening to withdraw their support from the company. So this became an existential threat and in that moment they decided to turn to advertising in a new way, to embrace it in a new way. And specifically what they discovered was that there was a lot of data that Google head haphazardly saved in some of its servers and in its data logs. And these data were either collateral behavioral signals as people searched in Browse using Google services. And what they discovered - and various people had been making discoveries about this along the way leading up to this moment of financial emergency - they discovered that there is collateral behavioral data which were not being used to improve Google's products and services but were just as I said just sitting around literally, these data had tremendous predictive value. So in the moment of financial emergency they decided to use these extra data - I call them surplus, behavioral surplus because they were leftover behavioral data that no one was using - to use this behavioral surplus to impose upon it their already - even for early in the 20th century - they're already very advanced computational capabilities and to come out through that with a prediction about what was called click through rates. So here's a very specific human behavior. What ads people were likely to click on called through rates, and they discovered that they could predict with a pretty high level of accuracy using the behavioral data their computation, what people were likely to click on. And out of this black box, they offered these predictions to their advertisers and of course the advertisers initially balked at this, because advertising had always been about choosing the place to present your ad, that the context of the ad would be aligned with the ad's brand values. This was a key piece of their advertising brief, the advertisers objectives. That's why they chose specific television shows or magazines, pagers and so forth. At this point Google said we're not going to tell you what goes on inside the black box. That's proprietary. That's our data, our unique data and our unique computation. But we will give you the product that comes out of the black box, the prediction. If you buy that product and put your ads will we tell you that then you will make a lot more money. Ultimately of course as we all know the advertisers agreed to this new relationship. And they went with this this new prediction product market. These new markets for the behavioral futures and they did make a lot of money.

AMT: Why are so many people willing to trade their privacy for access to the Internet or smart devices?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: First if all the mechanisms that I'm describing to you are unprecedented. The idea that they're taking our private experience is something that we've never thought about and we did not anticipate. Most of us went into the Internet. We went into the net worth [unintelligible] because we believed that it was going to empower us and believed that it was going to be a force with the democratization of knowledge. We believed in it as in emancipatory new environment, and believing this it was very hard for us to perceive these unprecedented mechanisms that were taking our behavior translated with actions and selling it to others not for our benefit but through their benefit. So in the very nature of the unprecedented comes the difficulty of cognition and so that were the first reasons that we fell prey to that difficulty. A second reason is that these vast new reserves of surveillance capital were largely trained and one specific goal and that was to design these systems, these new mechanisms, to design them in a way that would be invisible to us and would keep us in ignorance. Right from the very start when we look out even that early patterns that were being developed around the time of this invention, we can see the scientists actually writing in patterns about the fact that they can not only take the leftover hitherward surplus from what Google was collecting them but research behavior, but they could go into the our wine environment and they could hunt and capture bits of behavioral surplus that we never intended for anyone to have and they could even put different bits of behavioral intimation together and make inferences about us, inferences that we never made a decision to to share in any public way.

AMT: So how can surveillance capital has upheld mold society's behavior?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well okay well that's a great question right now because we're talking about the economic imperatives and this begins with scale. We need the light of data. It moves into scope. We need different kinds of data. But then they also discovered that the most predictive data of all comes from actually intervening in our behaviour, subtly shaping and shifting, tuning and herding our behavior toward those outcomes that are commercially most favorable to it. And so what happened here is a discovery of where they a scientist call this shift from margarine and just collecting data to actuation. The idea that you actually shape and trigger influence and modify behaviour in specific ways. And we've seen this new behavioural modification imperative in a whole variety of ways emerging, not only from Google and Facebook, but also from the various other surveillance capitalist that we see now rising up out of every economic domain. Now one of the things said we know is that Facebook has actively experimented with how to use the online environment to actually Marsi our behaviour in the real world. And one window we have on this is its behavioural and emotional contagion experiments. The experiments that we know now that they went public with, and there may be others that we don't know about. But what they went public with are two what they call massive scale, superscalar experiments; one in 2012, one in 2013. The first one used subliminal cues in the mine environment to get people to go and vote in what was in the 2012 mid-term elections in the United States. So that online subliminal hint, cues, in being used to actually change behavior in the real world, in this case voting behaviour. The second contagion experiment was conducted - published actually - in 2013. So it was being conducted while the world voiced its outrage is it learned about the first experiment. The second experiment was already on the web. And that second experiment also used online behavioral cues, subliminal cues that were hidden from us to actually create different kinds of emotions. In this case to make us either feel more happy or more sad. When the data scientist from Facebook, in collaboration with academics scientists, wrote up these experiments in well-known scholarly journals what they wrote were two things. So they concluded that they celebrate it. One was that we now know all that we can use cues in the online environment to change real world behavior. What you do and how you feel. The second thing that they celebrated in their write up was that we can do this in a way that completely bypasses the user's awareness. Out of our awareness.

AMT: Let me ask you. You said that the second one was about cues that they could use on emotion. What did they do?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well this was they manipulate the language that you saw online, the language that you saw in post. They manipulated the content of the news feed. They manipulated specific messages that got from people that you know. So they manipulated content. So you know some of those manipulations were designed to see if they can make you feel more sad. And they measured that by the words that you used in the variations of the words if you begin using your own messaging and posting for example the variance of that vocabulary from your standard vocabulary. So they could see that you were using language that reflected a sadder state of mind, versus language that reflected a happier state of mind. All of it being triggered by the language and the content that you were seeing in in your Facebook pages.

AMT: So that's pretty intrusive.

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: you think?

AMT: Yes. So I want to ask you about another example. A lot of us remember how for a while Pokemon Go was the game to play for kids and adults. What's the real story behind Pokémon Go?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Just before Pokemon Go went public, became the game that was offered to the public around the world. It was spun off from Google as a private little company called Niantic Labs. Still Google remained its primary investor. So at that point the idea that Pokemon Go was it the way it was going to be monetised was that players were going to buy accessories and game tokens and things like this as they play the game. And that supposedly was [unintelligible]. That actually is not how Pokemon go was monetized. It was using the game itself and the incentives that are indigenous to the game; finding creatures, going up levels and so forth. It was using those incentives to herd game players to specific play sets; establishments, bars, restaurants, Peacher joints, service establishments, places where they might picture a car or retail shops. These establishments paid Pokemon Go four foot fall. Footfall in the real world is exactly the same as quick through rate in the online world. We saw it quick through rate was a prediction of future human behavior. Now here is Pokemon Go promising these establishments footfall rate, predicting footfall rate on the basis of actually now be able to intervene in our behaviour and use the incentives of the game to reward and punish us, shape our behaviour to actually get us to the places that were going, hey Niantic Labs for our presence, our bodies, our feet falling on their floors. So here we have Pokemon Go establishing and hosting its own behavioural futures markets with its own business customers learning how, because I do regard Pokemon Go as a learning laboratory, a dry run, through what later would become the smart city - which Google likes to call by the way the Google city . So here we have a population scale experimental laboratory through how you use something that is fun again to herd populations towards those outcomes that are preferred commercially.

AMT: Shoshana Zuboff, I'm going to interject there because you just said dry run for the smart city. Toronto is the place where is a lot of controversy right now over a project between the city and Google's holding company alphabet called Sidewalk Labs. Is that what you're talking about?

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: That right now is what's going on in Toronto is the frontier of this contest over the smart city. The frontier of the contest of who owns and operates the city. Is it democracy and its citizens? Or is it a private firm whose very economic logic depends upon hidden mechanisms that we can neither know or combat, and which are separate from democratic oversight and governance. We don't know all the things that Sidewalk Labs is planning to do in Toronto. So there are some things we do know and there are a lot of things that we don't know. We do know that some of the people who were involved in the project who were there specifically through their expertise as specialists in data privacy. We do know that a couple of these folks quit the project in protest over the lack of serious attention to privacy in the data capture planning that is a critical layer of the Smart City project. So we know that. We are the smart city and we all want smart health and we all want the smart home. We all want that. What we want though, we want those things in a way that is empowering, emancipating, democratizing which is to say we want these powerful enriching new digital capabilities. We just want them without surveillance capitalism. We want them to be under the auspices of the people whose data create these capabilities. We want them to be under the auspices of the people who are intended to benefit from these capabilities. We want them to be under our auspices as citizens and as members of democratic societies. We want them to be under the oversight of democracy. When Google was informed that it would be given this opportunity by the City of Toronto, one of the things said Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, said was 'Oh good now it's our turn'. And by saying now it's our turn, the suggestion there is there democracy's turn is up. Now it's private capitalists turn, specifically as surveillance capitalist turn to make of the city what it will.

AMT: Shoshana Zuboff you've given us some to think about and you've raised a lot of questions that we need to follow up on. Thank you.

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Thank you. Thank you for the privilege, I appreciate it.

AMT: Shoshana Zuboff, she's professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School. Her new book is called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. And she joined us from Maine. We requested an interview with Google about the issues she raised. No one was available but the company did send us a statement and I'll read it in part quote: "Google has focused on protecting our user's data. You can see what data is collected and how it's used in one easy place; my account.Google.com and control it all from there. We also have policies that prohibit deceptive behavior and misuse of personal data". End quote. The statement goes on to say quote: "We keep your personal information private and safe and put you in control. The reality is that data is essential to providing our services and to make them useful for you. Of course we also use data to show relevant ads to you so we can make our services free for everyone. But this does not mean we sell your personal information" end quote. We also contacted Sidewalk Labs and Niantic Labs. They have as yet not responded to our request for comment. Let us know what you think of what you've been hearing on the program today. You can find us on Facebook. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Go to our email cbc.ca/thecurrent. Go to our website. Hit the link from there. And stay with Radio 1 for Q. Halifax indie rock band Winter Sleep is on the program. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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Thursday February 28, 2019 Full Transcript

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