60 Minutes - 1/17/2016: The Great Brain Robbery, Sean Penn, Mountain Lions of L.A.

Episode Date: January 18, 2016

Economic espionage sponsored by the Chinese government is costing U.S. corporations money and jobs; then, Sean Penn on his controversial meeting with the drug kingpin known as "El Chapo"; and Los Angeles is the only megacity in the world where mountain lions live side-by-side with humans To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. What is the Chinese government's ultimate goal? They want to develop certain segments of industry, and instead of trying to out-innovate, out-research, out-develop, they're choosing to do it through theft. John Carlin is the Assistant Attorney General for National Security with responsibility for counterterrorism and cyber attacks. He believes the Chinese government is stealing from every sector of the U.S. economy.

Corporate espionage is costing billions of dollars and millions of jobs. Part of the strategy in all this was to kill us. They set out to kill you. To kill the company. My article should not have made this much noise. El Chapo should not have been this popular a figure to read about. Tonight, the story behind Sean Penn's secret meeting with El Chapo. Why did he go?

What did he learn? Who is Kate Del Castillo? And how does Penn feel about the criticism of his trip? Of course I know that there are people who don't like me out of the gate. Not without controversy. Not without controversy. Fair enough. Los Angeles and its suburbs are home to 19 million people,

the only megacity in the world where mountain lions live side by side with humans. For 13 years, the National Park Service has been studying the animals, opening a window on their mysterious world, and raising questions about their survival in the land of freeways and suburban sprawl. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Charlie Rose.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. If spying is the world's second oldest profession, the government of China has given it a new modern day twist, enlisting an army of spies not to steal military secrets, but the trade secrets and intellectual property of American companies. It's being called the great brain robbery of America. The Justice Department says that the scale of China's corporate espionage is so vast, it constitutes a national security emergency, with China targeting virtually every sector of the U.S. economy and costing American companies hundreds of billions of dollars in losses and more than 2 million jobs.

They're targeting our private companies, and it's not a fair fight. A private company can't compete against the resources of the second largest economy in the world. John Carlin is the Assistant Attorney General for National Security with responsibility for counterterrorism, cyber attacks, and increasingly economic espionage. This is a serious threat to our national security. I mean, our economy depends on the ability to innovate. And if there's a dedicated nation state who's using its intelligence apparatus to steal day in and day out what we're trying to develop,

that poses a serious threat to our country. What is their ultimate goal, the Chinese government's ultimate goal? They want to develop certain segments of industry. And instead of trying to out-innovate, out-research, out-develop, they're choosing to do it through theft. All you have to do, he says, is look at the economic plans published periodically by the Chinese Politburo. They are, according to this recent report by the technology research firm Invent IP, in effect blueprints of what industries and what companies will be targeted for theft.

We see them put out the strategic plan, and then we see actions follow that plan. We see intrusion after intrusion on U.S. companies. Do you have a number of U.S. companies that have been hit? It's thousands of, actually, companies have been hit. Thousands of U.S. companies. Of U.S. companies. But getting CEOs from those companies to talk is nearly impossible,

because most of them still have business in China and don't want to be cut out of its huge market. Daniel McGahn, the head of American Superconductor, is an exception. His firm spent years and millions of dollars developing advanced computer software for wind turbines that McGahn says China looted, nearly putting him out of business.

He's talking because he wants to fight back. I'm personally never going to give this up. Too many lives were affected. Too many families were damaged through this. We can never give up on this. You had to fire 600 people. Yes. Out of how many jobs?

At the time, we were almost 900. So how much did you lose in share value? Total loss is well over a billion dollars. Today, his factory floor is largely silent, a shadow of this once thriving company. I think part of the strategy in all this was to kill us. They set out to kill you. To kill the company. How can he be so sure? Well, his story begins when China passed a clean energy law in 2005, calling for the creation of mega wind farms throughout the country. The law made China the hottest wind power market in the world. So McGann partnered with a small Chinese firm called Sinovel, which was partly owned by the government. Sinavel made the skeletons of the turbines and his company,

American Superconductor, the sophisticated gadgetry and computer code to run them. They actually built the turbine. They make the turbine, we make the controls. And did they make these turbines with your brains in them for the entire country of China? Yes. When he went into business there, China was already notorious for poaching American intellectual property. So he says he did everything he could think of to protect his technology from being stolen. We made sure that any software, any pieces of the code were restricted and used, were able to be accessed only by a few people within the company. Once they got everything over there, couldn't they reverse engineer it?

We believe that's what they tried to do. And what they learned was this encrypted protocol was in the way. They didn't quite understand how it worked, and they couldn't reverse engineer it. Everybody knows if it's on the Internet, some brilliant hacker can get at it. It wasn't accessible through the Internet. You kept it off the Internet. Yes. It sounds like you built a little fortress around your precious codes.

We certainly tried. Initially, business boomed in China for American Superconductor, with sales skyrocketing from $50 million a year to nearly half a billion. We were going through exponential growth. It's what every technology company wants to get to, is this high level of growth. We were there. Then in 2011, his engineers were testing the next generation software in China on Sinovel's turbines. The software had been programmed to shut down after the test, but the blades

didn't shut down. They never stopped spinning. So we said, why? We didn't really know. So the team looked at the turbine and saw running on our hardware a version of software that had not been released yet. That's when you realized? Realized something's wrong. So then we had to figure out how could this have happened. To find out, he launched an internal investigation and narrowed it down to this man,

Diane Karabasovic, an employee of American Superconductor based in Austria. He was one of the few people in the company with access to its proprietary software. He also spent a lot of time in China working with Sinovel. And what they did is they used Cold War era spy craft to be able to turn him. They turned him. And make him into an agent for them. Do you know any specifics of what they offered him? They offered him women, they offered him apartment, they offered him money, they offered him a new life. The arrangement included a $1.7 million contract that was spelled out in emails and instant messages that McGann's investigation found on Dayan's company computer. In this one,

from him to a Sinavel executive, Dayan lays out the quid pro quo. All girls need money. I need girls. Sinavel needs me. Sinavel executives showered him with flattery and encouragement. You are the, quote, best man, like Superman. And did they say, we want the source codes? It was almost like a grocery list. Can you get us A? Can you get us B? Can you get us C? Well, I've seen one of the messages, the text message,

in which Dayan says, I will send the full code, of course. That's the full code for operating their wind turbine. Dayan eventually confessed to authorities in Austria and spent a year in jail. Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities refused to investigate. So Daniel McGahn filed suit in civil court in China, suing Sinovel for $1.2 billion. But he suspected that China was still spying on his company and that Beijing had switched from Cold War to cutting-edge espionage. So why were you brought in? We were brought in because the attacks now continued in cyberspace.

McGahn hired Dmitry Alperovich and George Kurtz, co-founders of a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, to investigate. They zeroed in on a suspicious email purportedly sent by a board member to 13 people in the company. It had an attachment. A few people clicked on an attachment and that let the Chinese in. It was sort of like opening the front door. What do you mean they were in? Once they clicked on that email, they opened up the attachment. Malicious code started executing on their machine and it beaconed out to the Chinese and basically let them right into the company. From that point, they can hop to any machine and take any file that they wanted from that network. By analyzing who the email was sent to, they were able to infer that the Chinese were after more than just computer codes. They also

wanted to figure out the legal strategy of the company now that they were suing Cinevel for $1.2 billion. Whenever there's a big lawsuit, we'll see the Chinese government actually break into that company, break into the legal department, and figure out what's going on behind the scenes so they can better deal with that lawsuit. Now, did you know at that time who had perpetrated the hack? We were able to determine with great confidence that this was Unit 61398,

part of the Chinese military that was responsible for this attack. Unit 61398 is believed to be based in this nondescript building in Shanghai. It's part of the People's Liberation Army, and it's charged with spying on North American corporations. We estimate that there are several thousand people in this unit alone, this one unit. How active is this unit? It's one of the most prolific groups that we've tracked coming out of the Chinese government. It's unbelievable what they've been able to steal over the last decade.

Like what? Give us a sense of the scope. Every industry, engineering documents, manufacturing processes, chip designs, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, you name it, it's been stolen. In 2014, five military officers in the unit were criminally charged with economic espionage by John Carlin's National Security Division at the Justice Department. These were officers in uniform, and their day job was to get up, go to work, log on, and steal from a range of American companies. And you would watch, as we put in an exhibit in the case, the activity would spike around 9 o'clock in the morning. They get into work, turn on their computers, and start hacking into American companies. Then it calms down a little bit from about 12 to 1,

where they take a lunch break. And then it continues until the end of the day, 5 or 6 o'clock at night. And then they go home, and it decreases until the next morning. China has always denied that it conducts or condones economic espionage. But in September, during a visit to Washington, President Xi Jinping pledged for the first time that China would not engage or knowingly support cyber theft of intellectual property for commercial gain. It's the first time ever they've admitted

that economic espionage should be off limits and that they will not conduct it. Unfortunately, what we saw is that the very next day, the day after they were in the Rose Garden shaking hands, the intrusions continued. Wait, wait, wait, stop. The hacking has not stopped. The hacking has not stopped. But one of the things that has happened is that the military units that have been responsible for these hacks have actually had their mission taken away from them. It was given to the Ministry of State Security, their version of CIA. So in effect, they said, you guys are incompetent, you got caught, we'll give it to the guys that know better. The director of the National Counterintelligence

and Security Center confirms that there's no evidence China has curtailed its economic espionage. There's a lot of criticism out there among businessmen and some people in the government who complain that President Obama wags his finger at the Chinese, but he doesn't do anything. Well, I think it's important that we do take action. If we don't do things like bring the indictment, then we would be a paper tiger. You know, it feels like a pinprick, your indictment. They're never going to be extradited. Is there talk of putting any sanctions on the way we did with Russia when they went into the Ukraine?

The bottom line, I think, has to be that we continue to increase the costs until the behavior changes. If it doesn't change, then we need to keep thinking of additional actions, whether they're trade actions or sanctions, that change the behavior changes. If it doesn't change, then we need to keep thinking of additional actions, whether they're trade actions or sanctions, that change the behavior. The government of China declined our request for an interview, but sent us this comment. China has long suffered from massive cyber attacks and firmly opposes and combats all forms of cyber attacks in accordance with law. Groundless speculation, accusation, or hyping up is not helpful. In Massachusetts, Daniel McGahn is rebuilding, with much of

his business now shifted to India. But adding insult to injury, Sinovel is now exporting wind turbines with his stolen technology, including one purchased by the state of Massachusetts using federal stimulus funds. So the U.S. government facilitated bringing the stolen goods into the U.S. And they're here now? And they're here now, and it's part of the up and running. Sinavel, using the stolen source codes, has sold wind turbines here in Massachusetts. To the government of Massachusetts, funded by the federal government of the United States of America. Sometimes historic events suck.

But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. When Joaquin El Chapo Guzman slipped out of Mexico's most secure prison through a secret tunnel last July, the drug lord triggered an

international manhunt. It was his second escape from Mexico's most secure prison. Military and law enforcement on both sides of the border brought every tool at their disposal to the search. So who should find him but Oscar-winning actor and self-described experiential journalist Sean Penn with the help of a Mexican actress? The story of Penn's visit with El Chapo appearing in Rolling Stone caused a sensation. It was published after Mexican Marines raided Guzman's Sinaloa hideout and recaptured him. Thursday night, for the first time, Sean Penn talked with us about his encounter with El Chapo. He had a lot to say. Why does Sean Penn want to go to Mexico to interview a drug lord who's escaped from prison with a notorious reputation for doing terrible things and supplying a lot of drugs to America. What's the point? I think the policy of the war on drugs, which so deeply affects all of our lives, seems not to change. It seems to be so unmovable. And it occurs to me that often because we want

to simplify the problem and we want to look at a black hat and put our resources into focusing on the bad guy. And I understand that. I absolutely understand justice and the rule of law. And so I do what I call experiential journalism. I don't have to be the one that reports on the alleged murders or the amount of narcotics that are brought in. I go and I spend time in the company of another human being, which everyone is. And I make an observation and try to parallel that, try to balance that with the focus that we that I believe we we tend to put too much emphasis on. So when I understood from colleagues of mine that there was a potential for contact with him, it just struck me that I wanted to... To do what, John? I mean, I don't understand that,

because, I mean, clearly drugs are a huge problem in America. There's a huge consumption of drugs in America, and it's a terrible thing, and what it does to our society. But what is going to see him going to do about it other than somehow getting a lot of attention? I feel complicit in the suffering that is going on because I'm not thinking about it every day. I'm not watching these laws that are showing no progression, these rehabilitations that are not happening. So I'm looking the other way. I find that equally complicit with murders in Juarez.

Do you think we demonize El Chapo too much? I think that to over-demonize any human being is not in our best self-interest. Like it or not, we're married to them. They're of our time. They're affecting us. So like a marriage, you might want a divorce. But you've got to look at this person as a person, or you're never going to have.

Or if the argument, if all we aim to understand is that this is a very bad person, then let's not understand anything else. You wanted to have a conversation about the policy of a war on drugs. That's right. That was the motivating factor for you. With the reader. With the reader.

With him, I wanted to sit, observe, ask him questions, and then use that as an anchor into this article. What did he say? Why did he accept? Well, I can't read his mind. Yeah, but you talked to him, and you know the characters involved. Mm-hmm. I would say that, you know, from the conversation that was had, he, in several ways, wanted to be on the record.

How Sean Penn came to be on the record with El Chapo is a tale. Penn knew of a Mexican TV and movie star who had caught Chapo's attention. Kate Del Castillo had once played a drug lord on a telenovela. Chapo was a fan. They kept in touch through text and social media. Last August, Del Castillo and Penn met, and she agreed to arrange a meeting with El Chapo. In October, Penn, Del Castillo, and two others traveled by small plane and truck into cartel-controlled territory.

They were escorted by one of El Chapo's sons. I was baffled at his will to see us. Nonetheless... Because you thought he might be putting himself at risk. Yeah. I mean, we followed the protocols laid out by them in terms of communications and so on, as well as travel. So as far as you know, you had nothing to do do and your visit had nothing to do with his recapture? Here's the things that we know. We know that the Mexican government has, they've been very humiliated by the original escape. They were clearly very humiliated by the notion that someone found him before they did.

Well, nobody found him before they did. We're not smarter than the DEA or the Mexican intelligence. We had a contact upon which we were able to facilitate an invitation that allowed us in. What we know now from transcripts of text released by the Mexican government is that El Chapo was interested in the actress. He didn't even know who Sean Penn was. Was it naive of you, naive, to believe that you could come to Mexico, meet with Cade del Castillo,

and go see El Chapo without somebody knowing about it? I assume they knew about it. And I say so in the article. I was stunned that he would risk our trip. I was stunned. El Chapo met with them and he agreed to a future meeting, including a formal interview with Sean Penn, eight days later. When the manhunt grew more intense, the face-to-face interview became too risky. Instead, Penn sent a list of questions, and El Chapo recorded his answers. The questions were not confrontational. They included El Chapo growing up in poverty and who he blamed for the drug problem.

You understand that a lot of people would have wanted you in this conversation, in a sense, to see how he would react if you wanted to hold him accountable for his life. Did you consider that? It just means that if somebody wants me to ask the questions that they want me to ask. Right. Well, there's that little problem we run into in life. They're not me. So. And you had no.

But just tell me this. Did you have any interest in understanding how he justified, felt about, made decisions, organized. I have a fascination with all of that. Penn's Rolling Stone article is a 10,000-word, sometimes rambling, often gripping account of the El Chapo meeting. It was published the day after Chapo was recaptured, and it quickly became the headline. My article should not have made this much noise. El Chapo should not have been this popular a figure to read about. Well, he was a figure that people read about and talked about before you ever went to Mexico.

Oh, I'm well aware of that. What about those who say this is his ego? He likes being in the center of this. He's an adventurer. He thinks of himself as a writer in the tradition of Hunter Thompson with a kind of experiential quality to him. Do you accept any of that? Do I accept that people feel that way? Yeah. I absolutely accept that they feel that way. And are they right? No, they're not right. On January 8th, when the Mexican Marines finally raided El Chapo's hideout as seen in this video,

they caught him as he attempted still another escape. Chapo's arrest raised questions about whether the actor and actress had been tracked and helped lead the Mexican Marines to the drug lord. Mexico's attorney general claimed they had been, quote, essential. Do you believe that the Mexican government released this because they wanted to see you blamed and to put you at risk? Yes. They wanted to encourage the cartel to put you in their crosshairs. Yes. They wanted to encourage the cartel to put you in their crosshairs.

Yes. Are you fearful for your life? No. Do you believe the cartel wants to do harm to you because they have accepted the idea that the visit that you made somehow led to the recapture of El Chapo? They've been in this business a long time. They've dealt with law enforcement issues for a long time. They've dealt with misinformation for a long time. There are irrational people.

And so I can't say for sure, you know, that there's no risk. Have you heard from anybody in the cartel? No. What's it been like for you? What are your concerns? I'll be, you know, as honest as I can be with you about this. I can be very, you know, flamboyant in my words sometimes. I can get angry like many people can. I'm really sad about the state of journalism in our country. It has been an incredible hypocrisy and an incredible lesson in just how much they don't know and how disserved we are. You know, of course I know that there are people who don't like me out of the gate, whether it's political. Not without controversy.

Not without controversy. Fair enough. Again, journalists who want to say that I'm not a journalist. Well, I want to see the license that says that they're a journalist. Sean Penn did commit something of a mortal sin for most journalists by allowing the most wanted man in the world to approve his story. What was brokered for me to have the interview with El Chapo was that I would finish the article, send it to him, and if he said no, then that was no harm, no foul to any reader. It would never be printed. It would never be printed. It was printed, and

soon after, Penn's article was being criticized for being sympathetic to a killer responsible for the deaths of thousands and the biggest drug supplier in the world. I was not present to report on the things people would like to see reported on. I was not present at murders. I was not present to see narcotics. I was not present for that. I was not present to see narcotics. I was not present for that. What I was present for, I wrote. I wrote that to use it as a pillar for an article about the policy of the war on drugs. You're not naive. And you knew that if Sean Penn went to see a drug lord on the run and had a conversation with him with a Mexican actress who he was smitten with. You knew that's a story. You knew that's a big story. You're not naive.

And now you're blaming people for wanting to know more about it. It's inevitable. No, no, no, no. My problem with people is that they think they know more about it. Let's go to the big picture of what we all want. We all want this drug problem to stop. And if you are in the moral right or on the far left, just as many of your children are doing these drugs, just as many of your brothers and sisters, your mothers and fathers, their teachers at school are doing these drugs just as many. And how much time have they spent in the last week since this article come out talking about that? One one percent. I think there's not much dialogue about my article failed. Let me be clear. My article has failed in that the question in that everything that's spoken about is everything but what I was trying to speak about.

You regret that? That I failed that. But you're really saying what I really regret is not anything that I did. I regret that people misunderstood what I did. That's what I'm saying, yeah. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

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the only megacity in the world where mountain lions, also known as cougars and pumas, live side by side with humans. For 13 years, the National Park Service has been studying the animals, opening a window on their mysterious world and raising questions about their survival in the land of freeways and suburban sprawl. They are the unseen neighbors up the hill, and sometimes they come to call. When you moved here, did you know

that there was a mountain lion in the vicinity? No, not at all. Not at all. There's signs for rattlesnakes. There's not signs for mountain lions. Some view you have here. Yeah. Paula and Jason Archinakos' house is something of a local landmark, not just for the killer view of Los Angeles, but also for an encounter a workman had one day in the crawlspace under the house. He was doing some wiring when he saw something scary. He comes into my office terrified, and he says, bro, you have a mountain lion in your house, bro. And so I said to him, a mountain lion? He goes, yeah, man, a mountain lion,

face to face, eye to eye, came eye to eye with it. And he was like terrified. He had been eye to eye with P-22, so named by the Park Service. P for Puma, number 22 out of 44 they've studied, photographed here with a small camera on a very long stick. P-22 wears a Park Service tracking collar that sends GPS signals on his location, signals that were blocked this day because he was under the house. He was just laying there trying to snooze, completely just like we woke him from a nap.

Soon the house was packed with cameras and reporters. P-22 was already a local celebrity because of this National Geographic picture, taken by a remote camera a mile or two from the Archinacos' house. Wildlife experts finally decided to shoo everybody out after the 11 o'clock news, hoping P-22 might head back into the hills nearby, which he did. So when did he leave? How did he leave? We don't know how. They call them ghost cats. Yeah, right. There you go. And though they live in the shadows in much of Southern California, they're never far away. A trail camera caught this one a stone's throw from the rooftops

of suburbia. And these animals do their best to, you know, stay elusive and away from us. Even us researchers who follow them almost daily, we hardly ever see them. Jeff Sikich is a Park Service biologist, an expert on big cats who holds something of a record. He's seen and captured P-22 four times now. This time, he corners the animal and hits him with a tranquilizer dart. Quickly, it knocks P-22 out, with his eyes still open. The batteries on his GPS collar were running low. Replacing them gives Sickich and his crew a chance for a checkup. P-22 is healthy, weighing in at 125 pounds.

From experience, Sickich knows that when the animal comes to, it's no threat. The instinct to get away from people kicks in. Sure enough, a groggy P-22 wakes up and stumbles back into the shadows. Here's the past eight months of where P-22 has traveled. The GPS signals from their collars tell Sickich and his colleague Seth Riley where the animals roam. P-22 wanders the hills of Griffith Park, a small enclave in Los Angeles frequented by hikers and visitors to the park's famed observatory. We haven't, knock on wood, had any major conflicts with him and people, and it shows that even a large carnivore like a mountain lion can live right among people for many years.

They think P-22 migrated east across the Santa Monica Mountains for 20 miles or so, perhaps chased out by a bigger male. He somehow crossed the 405 freeway, one of the world's busiest, worked his way through Bel Air and Beverly Hills, and somewhere near the Hollywood Bowl Amphitheater, crossed a second busy freeway, the 101, to Griffith Park. P-22 had it great. No competition, no other adult males in Griffith Park. Seemed to be plenty of prey for him. He's been in Griffith Park for three years now, all alone, looking for love in all the wrong

places. Yeah, you know, still hanging out there, which is pretty surprising. I would have bet he would have left looking for a potential mate. If the mating urge overwhelms him, he could take his chances crossing the freeways again to find a female, a very risky business. Why not move him? Usually it doesn't work, moving lions. We'll just be moving this animal, this adult male, into another adult male's territory, and that usually results in the death of one of them. And in the Verdugo Mountains, a small range overlooking the San Fernando Valley,

there's another lonely lion. I never thought one would actually come through our backyard, and he was right next to our bedroom window. And then he'd continue up this way. Nancy Vandermeer and Eric Barcalow moved here to be close to wildlife and got their wish in the form of a mountain lion named P-41, who seems to love their backyard deck. So he's right out here where we are. Exactly where we are. He has come to visit at least 10 times, triggering security cameras taking both video and still pictures.

The area is called Cougar Canyon. What else? And here he is just literally made a loop around our house for some reason. Like proud parents with baby pictures, they show off their video scrapbook. And let me point out how his paws are on the wood and not on the gravel so that he can make as little noise as possible. Wow. They want to be silent at all times.

Camera technology has revolutionized the way mountain lions and other wild animals are studied. Joanna Turner is a sound effects editor for Universal Studios. On her own time, she's one of several citizen scientists, as they're called, who put remote cameras up in the wild, hoping to get that perfect shot. There he is. Oh, come on, buddy. How do you know where to look? We'll look for tracks, and we'll look for signs of them,

and we look for deer because that's their food source. To lure the lions into camera range, she'll sprinkle catnip, vanilla extract, even men's cologne on a branch. And just like house cats, they love it. The holy grail is a shot like this one of P-41. But her cameras also catch bobcats, coyotes, foxes, and bears, troublemakers. You come and find that a bear has, you know, turned the camera sideways or licked the lens or something, and that happens weekly. What's the most amazing thing you've seen? My favorite is a video of a female mountain lion and her two kittens and they're nursing on her. I still can't believe that that happened, that she decided to lay down right in front of the camera. Science is learning much more about what happens

when the lions are penned in by freeways and houses. The Santa Monica mountain range is about 200 square miles, the area usually staked out by just one male mountain lion. Here, there's often a mix of a dozen or so, males and females. It's a family you wouldn't want to belong to. Bob Wayne is an evolutionary biologist at UCLA. Using DNA from the blood samples taken by the Park Service, primarily in the Santa Monica Mountains, his scientists have built a family tree, unlocking some strange and deadly secrets.

It's just rife with incestuous matings. It's not a healthy situation. The DNA shows males are mating with their own offspring and killing them as well, sometimes even killing their mates. And that doesn't happen in the wild normally? Rarely. Both the incest and this excessive amount of strife are very unusual. You think that is all because of this limited amount of space they have? It is. And on some primal level, they long for more space. At least 13 have been killed in traffic in recent years, trying to move on. It's a double-edged sword.

Being penned in, the lions can't get out to the wide open spaces away from the city. And the incestuous inbreeding will only get worse if lions from the wilderness can't get in to mate and strengthen the gene pool. But there is a possible solution. It's an ambitious plan to build the animals and overpass on the 101 freeway to open up a migration route. It's been done elsewhere in the world. This one crosses the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park. At the proposed site on the 101, the freeway is 10 lanes wide, traveled by 175,000 cars a day.

It would be a complicated, costly project. It would be an amazing statement to say, okay, we care this much in Southern California about wild places and wild animals that we would do this and make a place for animals to get back and forth. Is that their only hope? Pretty much for our Santa Monica Mountain lion population, yes.

And what about future generations? That's a pretty good signal. The beeps are coming from a collared female lion, P35. Researchers think she might have a newborn kitten or two at one GPS location where she's been spending a lot of time. When the signals show P-35 is a safe distance away from the spot, Jeff Sickich moves in, working on sheer intuition, looking for a needle in a haystack. And he finds it.

A feisty, three-and-a-half-week-old female, P-44. Her blue eyes will change to amber in a few months. The spots that camouflage her will disappear. She's pretty chill. Yeah, she's good. She's so freaking cute. Sikich and his crew work in whispers in case the mother is within earshot. Green tag.

P-44 is given tags to identify her on trail camera pictures. She appears healthy, but given the danger she faces on the edge of civilization, her future is a question mark. All right, time to go back. All Jeff Sickich can do is put her back where he found her. To take her chances in the shadow of the city. In the mail, viewers commented on our story about prisoners exonerated after years behind bars. Ray Hinton, who spent nearly three decades on Alabama's death row, was freed without

so much as an apology. I will say I'm sorry for those who did not say it. I am profoundly impressed by Ray's attitude, his faith, and his decision not to live the rest of his days in anger. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.