60 Minutes - 6/10/2018: Singapore Summit, Secret Weapon, JR

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

All eyes will be on Singapore this week -- as President Donald Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un meet for the highly anticipated summit. Here's CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin with a preview of what to expect. Lesley Stahl will introduce us to Brad Parscale -- who played a key role in the president's election. He is known only as JR -- an artist whose work is displayed around the world. Anderson Cooper has his story on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 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

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. At the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, NASIC for short, more than 100 photo interpreters, engineers, rocket scientists, and intelligence analysts

pour through reams of data collected every time North Korea launches a missile. Last summer, says NASIC commander Sean Larkin, the North Korean threat went to a whole new level. They demonstrated the ability that they could reach the continental United States. The lower 48? Yes. I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won. And Brad Parscale should know he was a significant figure in the Trump campaign, sending out carefully tailored ads to millions of people on Facebook. And get this with the direct help of Facebook employees.

We had their staff embedded inside our offices. What? Yeah, Facebook employees would show up for work every day in our offices. That word dignity to you is important. You know, the people made me realize it's important in every single place. Dignity is something that all of us want. All of us. No matter what.

No matter the background. That's the little girl. Why? Because the issues people are facing are life and death. Yeah, of course. Dignity goes through the way we're being seen by the others, the way we portray ourselves. I think some people hearing that are going to say, look, you're telling me that people, you know, who don't know where their next meal is coming from

are struggling to survive, care about art? You know what? Yes. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm David Martin. I'm Bill Whitaker.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. leaders meeting in Singapore to negotiate the total elimination of what just last year was considered the gravest threat facing the United States. The stakes couldn't be higher. Donald Trump is demanding the complete dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. To Kim Jong-un, those weapons, the nuclear warheads and the missiles that would carry them, are his country's most valuable possession. He is being asked to lay all his nuclear secrets on the table. As we reported in previous stories for 60 Minutes,

U.S. intelligence agencies have expended enormous effort trying to uncover those secrets as North Korea developed not only a nuclear arsenal, but the capability to reach the United States. At the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, NASIC for short, more than 100 photo interpreters, engineers, rocket scientists, and intelligence analysts pour through reams of data collected every time North Korea launches a missile. Last summer, says NASIC commander Sean Larkin, the North Korean threat went to a whole new level. They demonstrated the ability that they could reach the continental United States.

The lower 48? Yes. There were two tests in the month of July. Both were launched at a very high angle, so did not go far out to sea. But once NASIC crunched the numbers, there was no doubt. Had they been fired on a standard trajectory, they could have reached California and beyond. Math is our secret weapon. So there's lots of things that go into an ICBM or other types of weapon systems

that simply, even if we don't have the pieces of the puzzle, we can do the math and figure out what's missing. This is a computer simulation of the weapon the North Koreans call the God of War, an intercontinental ballistic missile. This is the actual code that we develop. It was produced by Jeremy Sewell and his team of analysts at NASIC. So can you take me through what this would look like on a flight? Yes. The first stage of the system is there to get it off the ground, get initial motion,

but then it will drop that stage. After the missile's engines have centered into space, all that is left is the reentry vehicle. A warhead would be inside as gravity pulls it back to Earth. You're at the mercy of the atmosphere at that point. You're slamming into it at many thousands of miles per hour. So that will have tremendous forces imparted on the reentry vehicle. And what kind of temperatures are we talking about? Many thousands of degrees. North Korea cannot attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons until it develops a reentry vehicle

that can stand that kind of heat. This is the setup before the test. Hugh Griffiths is the head of the team which monitors the North Korean missile program for the UN Security Council. He says these pictures, released by the regime two years ago, were an attempt to prove it had already succeeded. A re-entry vehicle was subjected

to a rocket engine blast. Is that a realistic test? We assessed that it wasn't sufficiently realistic to be credible. Because the rocket engine does not create enough heat? Correct. The heat produced by the rocket engine is not sufficient to mimic what this would experience re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. North Korea released a picture of the scorched re-entry vehicle, and this one of Kim Jong-un being shown how little had been burned away.

The idea of this narrative is to prove that yet another requirement of the nuclear and ballistic missile program has been achieved. Just after Thanksgiving last year, North Korea test-fired an even bigger ICBM. This one, had it been fired on a standard trajectory, could have reached anywhere in the United States. They've been referred to as the ultimate weapon. They get to the target very quickly. An ICBM has a reentry velocity on the order of 4 to 5 miles per second.

So there's very little time to react. Tom Boyd, the senior intelligence analyst for ballistic missiles at NASIC, told us last year that North Korea had yet to demonstrate a true capability to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. Ultimately, if they want to have confidence that the system works as intended, they have to flight test it and prove that that reentry vehicle can survive realistic reentry conditions. So that really is then the moment of truth. When they launch, if they launch, a ballistic missile out over the Pacific Ocean at a range approximating what it would take to reach the United States. That would give them higher confidence that the system really works as they want it to.

Since that ICBM launch in November, North Korea has not conducted any more tests. And Kim Jong-un has declared his nuclear program a success. He even showed off what purported to be a thermonuclear warhead. That shape is consistent with what we would call the two-stage thermonuclear weapon. But that essentially means sort of a modern hydrogen bomb. Sig Hecker should know. He is a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which designs American nuclear weapons.

Could they put that peanut-shaped device on a missile? They definitely want us to think so. In the background, they actually show the warhead positioned in the nose cone of the missile, which we interpreted to be an ICBM. Just hours after these photos were released, North Korea conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test in a remote underground site. U.S. intelligence estimated the device was many times more powerful than the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima. Their confidence level, you know, is amazing. I mean, it's amazing. They go and show this thing, and two hours later, they detonate this weapon.

Hecker knows as much as any American about North Korea's nuclear program. He's actually been there and seen it for himself. I was immensely surprised by how much they showed me and with the openness with which they showed and explained that to me. In 2004, the North Koreans took them to a place called Yongbyon, where they had been operating a small nuclear reactor. This is a reactor that was not very good for producing electricity, but it was very good for making plutonium.

After showing them the reactor, the North Koreans took them to a building where they claimed to be reprocessing spent fuel from the reactor into weapons-grade plutonium. They just showed me the facility and basically said, look, you have to believe us, we extracted the plutonium. Did you believe them? The answer was yes, but I didn't let them think that I believed them. Hecker's tour guide offered to show him the plutonium. They bring in, and it's a red metal box about yay big, about this thick.

They open the metal box. They take out a white wooden box. The white wooden box has a slide-off top. So they slide off the top. I look in there. The director says, over here, this glass jar, that's our product. That's the plutonium. You know plutonium when you see it.

Plutonium by itself is sort of a silvery color if it's not oxidized. If it rusts, oxidizes a little bit, it sort of turns gray and black, and this stuff is gray and black. This is what plutonium looks like, the radioactive element which produced the first nuclear explosion in July 1945. So I said, I'd like to hold the jar with the metal in it, and they allow me to hold it. So what I learned from holding, well, first of all, plutonium is dense. It ought to be heavy. It was. The other thing, plutonium is radioactive, so a glass jar ought to be warm, and it was warm.

What impact did the information you came back with have on U.S. intelligence assessments of the North Korean nuclear program? It changed from one of we don't know exactly what they have, if they have enough to make anything, to the fact that they actually could have they have enough to make anything, to the fact that they actually could have four to six bombs. Well, that's a fairly major change. That's a big change. U.S. intelligence relied on satellite photos of the Yongbyon nuclear complex to monitor how much plutonium was being produced by the reactor.

This area is where the small plutonium production reactor is. David Albright is director of the Institute for Science and International Security and a leading expert on North Korea's nuclear weapons program. How do you know when it's operating and when it's just in idle? Basically evidence of heat. And what you see in this picture is there's steam rising here. But satellite photos could not solve the mystery of whether North Korea was also building a second type of bomb made of uranium, using gas centrifuges like these to enrich the uranium to bomb-grade levels. I had many meetings

with North Korean officials where they vehemently denied they had a gas centrifuge program and denying to the point where they're pounding, you know, almost pounding their fist on the table, but getting very angry. In fact, the centrifuge plant was hiding in plain sight, but no one knew it until 2010 when Sig Hecker was invited back and taken inside that blue-roofed building. On the way in, I had a chief engineer, and he actually stopped outside and he said, Dr. Hecker, we didn't want to show you this facility, but our superiors made us do it. And so we got up to the second floor, looked down at the hall. And you saw? I was just flabbergasted.

I could not believe what I was seeing. Essentially, 2,000 centrifuges lined up. Looked beautiful, modern. So why so flabbergasted, though? Everybody suspected they were secretly enriching uranium. Here they are, secretly enriching uranium. We had no idea they had this many centrifuges and that modern. And the most amazing thing, they put a blue roof on this facility

that is so visible from overhead satellite imagery, and nobody knew. So they built this modern uranium enrichment plant under the noses of U.S. spy satellites. Of all the spy satellites. So a lot of people say, well, that shows how bad in our intel agencies are. It doesn't. It shows how easy it is to build those centrifuge facilities and hide them. Since Hecker's last visit, that blue roof building, which held 2,000 centrifuges, has doubled in size. And it is almost certainly

not the only uranium enrichment plant in North Korea. They went out and decided that now we're going to buy enough materials, equipment, to build 8,000 centrifuges, 10,000 centrifuges. So when they go out on the market to buy that much material, does that become evident? Yes. In a sense, it was a smoking gun that North Korea was trying to scale up its gas centrifuge program. Last year, U.S. intelligence estimated North Korea could have enough bomb-grade material for as many as 60 weapons, an estimate considerably higher than Albright's, who believes those centrifuges break down a lot. What's your estimate of the number of nuclear weapons that North Korea has?

13 to 30 nuclear weapons as of the end of 2016. Albright now estimates that by the end of 2017, North Korea had between 15 and 35 nuclear weapons. That's a wide range of uncertainty. How can the U.S. be sure North Korea has dismantled all its nuclear weapons if it doesn't know how many they have to begin with? Whenever you make a guess

as to how much plutonium, highland-rich uranium, how many bombs they have, is because of the highly enriched uranium and the fact that you can hide it, we simply don't know. We have great uncertainty and even less what I call observability. Do we know that it's operating?

Do we know where it is? We don't know. North Korea has already taken some first steps towards halting its nuclear program, but to eliminate it, Kim Jong-un will have to reveal all the secret locations he has been hiding from the U.S. And even then, Sig Hecker estimates it would take 10 years to negotiate and then dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa?

As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at Visa.ca slash fintech. 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. Tonight, you will hear from the man President Donald Trump appointed as his 2020 re-election campaign manager. His name is Brad Parscale, and he got the job because, as we first reported in October, Parscale was the president's secret weapon in his 2016 run for the White House. 42-year-old Parscale was one of the campaign's top decision makers, operating largely out of public view. He was hired to run the digital team, but over time he came to oversee advertising, data collection, and much of the fundraising. He says his main task was competing with the Clinton campaign's huge advantage in money and TV ads. What he decided to do was turn to social media, most importantly, to Facebook.

I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won. And Facebook is how he won. going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won. And Facebook is how he won. I think so. I mean, I think Donald Trump won. But I think Facebook was the method. It was the highway in which his car drove on.

And Brad Parscale was in the driver's seat. In the beginning of the campaign, he worked alone at home in San Antonio. But by the end, he had 100 people reporting to him. One of his main jobs was to send out carefully tailored, low-cost digital ads to millions of people. And these were ads on Facebook? Facebook, we did them on Twitter, Google Search, other platforms. Facebook was the 500-pound gorilla, 80% of the budget kind of thing. Facebook's advertising technology helped President Obama in 2012.

But today, Facebook offers something far more precise and sophisticated. While the president tweeted in the past that Facebook was always anti-Trump, Parscale relied heavily on the company, particularly on its cutting-edge targeting tools. One of the best things Facebook did for you, I heard, was penetrate the rural vote. Is that correct? Yeah. So Facebook now lets you get to places, and places possibly that you would never go with TV ads. Now I can find 15 people in the Florida panhandle that I would never buy a TV commercial for. And we took opportunities that I think the other side didn't. Like what?

We had their staff embedded inside our offices. What? Yeah. Facebook employees would show up for work every day in our offices. Whoa, wait a minute. Facebook employees showed up at the Trump headquarters? Google employees and Twitter employees. They were embedded in your campaign?

I mean, they were there multiple days a week, three, four days a week, two days a week. What were they doing inside? Helping teach us how to use their platform. Helping you get elected? I asked each one of them by email, I want to know every single secret button, click, technology you have. I want to know everything you would tell Hillary's campaign plus some. And I want your people here to teach me how to use it. Inside?

Yeah, I want them sitting right next to us. How do you know they weren't Trojan horses? Because I'd ask them to be Republicans and I would talk to them. Oh, you only wanted Republicans. I wanted people who supported Donald Trump from their companies. And that's what you got? Yeah. They already have divisions set up that way. What do you mean?

They already have groups of people in their political divisions that are Republican Democrat. You're kidding. Yeah. They're businesses. They're publicly traded companies with stock price. Did Hillary's campaign have someone in bed? I heard that they didn't accept any of their offers. So you're saying Facebook and the others offered an in bed and they said no. That's what I've heard. People in the Clinton campaign confirmed that the offer was made and turned down. Facebook told us in a statement, for candidates across the political spectrum, Facebook offers the same levels of support in key moments to help campaigns understand how best to

use the platform. And indeed, both campaigns used Facebook's technology extensively to reach out to potential voters. Parscale said the Trump campaign used the technology to micro-target on a scale never seen before and to customize their ads for individual voters. We were making hundreds of thousands of them. You'd make 100,000 ads? Programmatically. For 100,000 different ads every day? Average day, 50,000, 60,000 ads. This was all automated. Changing language, words, colors, changing things, because certain people like a green button better than a blue button. Some people like the word donate or contribute. So how would you know? Let's say I like a green button.

How do you know I only like a green button? Because I give you the red and blue buttons, you never click on them. These are just an assorted amount of ads. Parscale showed us how they tested, by sending out multiple versions of the same ad with only subtle differences. Here we have an American flag, here we have a face of Hillary, different colors, the blues, different messages above. So you'd send two identical ads with different colors? Maybe thousands. You'd send thousands of ads with different colors?

What it is, is what can make people react? What catches their attention? Remember, there's so much noise on your phone or on your desktop. What is it that makes it go, I'm going to stop and look? To get people to stop and look, he crafted different messages for different people so that you only got ads about the issues you cared about most. He showed us three ads that looked alike. It's pretty much the identical design, the positive coloring, different message.

This one is tax, this one is child care, this one is energy. Yeah, so they were all targeted to different users of whatever platform. In this case, it was Facebook. Sent it to different people, and it could be each other's next-door neighbors, all in Ohio. This one person at 11 Elm Street gets this one, and 13 Elm Street gets that one. Yep, yep.

Parscale took some heat for taking micro-targeting too far, because he hired Cambridge Analytica. The company, now defunct, used so-called psychographics that micro-target ads based on personality. For instance, an extrovert would get one kind of message, an erotic person, another. It's controversial because of its Orwellian overtones. After Mr. Trump won, Cambridge Analytica said it was key to the victory. But Parscale insists he never used psychographics. He said it doesn't work.

So you didn't use it because you didn't think it really worked as opposed to you didn't use it because you thought it was wrong, that it's manipulative or sinister. I don't believe it's sinister. No. Okay. You just don't think it works. I just don't think it works. Parscale's title was digital director, but by the end of the campaign, his portfolio grew. He oversaw data collection, polling, advertising both online and on TV, and significantly digital fundraising. By adding donation buttons for people to click on in the online ads, he was able to bring in a record $240 million in small donations. How many presidential campaigns had you worked on before this one? Zero.

Your wife has a wonderful expression about you being thrown into this. Yeah, she said that I was thrown into the Super Bowl, never played a game and won. That's what it sounds like. Young Republicans, you gotta to do thumbs up. It's made him a local hero back home in Kansas. He grew up in Topeka playing basketball. He's 6'8". After briefly working at a tech company in California,

he moved to San Antonio, Texas and became a marketer. He taught himself to code, opened a small web design business, and went looking for customers. I started tapping shoulders at a bookstore and asking people if they needed a website when they were buying books on web design. You're hanging around at a bookstore? Yeah, Borders. You're hanging around at Borders and say, can you hire me? Yeah.

Come on. Yeah. So how did you get involved with the Trump people? I was sitting at IHOP, and I got an email. I was eating a ham and cheese omelet. I was. And I get an email, and I open it up, and it says, this is Kathy Kay from the Trump org.

Can you please call me? Out of nowhere? Out of nowhere. That was six years ago. She was looking for someone to design a website for a Trump real estate project. Parscale bid lowest, got the job, and soon many more followed. Websites for Eric's Foundation, Melania's skincare line, the family's wineries. Then, in early 2015, came another life-changing email. It said, Donald Trump is thinking about running for president. We need a website in two days.

So I wrote back. I said, yeah, I'll do it for $1,500. $1,500. Yeah. And by the end, it was $94 million. $94 million is what his company was paid, but much of it was spent on things like buying ads. Parscale learned very fast on the job with the help of the Republican National Committee. They had amassed a giant database to identify the issues people cared about and predict how nearly 200 million Americans would vote. One reason Parscale thinks President Trump won is because of an issue the RNC database honed in on that he says the Clinton campaign missed. Infrastructure. Infrastructure. It was voters in the Rust Belt that cared about their roads being rebuilt, their highways, their bridges. They felt like the world was coming. So I started making ads

that would show the bridge crumbling. You know, that's micro-targeting there, because I can find the 1,500 people in one town that care about infrastructure. Now, that might be a voter that normally votes Democrat. While he tried to persuade Democrats to vote for Mr. Trump, the campaign was accused in a Businessweek article of trying to suppress the vote of idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans, a charge he denies. Did you micro-target by race? No, we did not.

Never? Not at all. Did you post hateful images? I don't believe so. The candidate, Trump, was never shy about pushing buttons, about pushing prejudices. He used what most people would consider offensive language sometimes. I don't think the math said that most people saw those as offensive. I think a small group of people saw those offensive who have a lot of power.

But you did mirror him. We mirrored certain things that he would say, mainly things he said in rallies. Many of the messages he sent out were what's known as dark ads. They're called dark because they're micro-targeted to individual users who are the only ones who see them. Unless they choose to share them, they disappear. Can you say anything you want in those dark ads? No.

They're really not transparent. No. I said something crazy in those, they would share a million times, it would be all over. So if you said something that appealed to racists... Oh, it would be everywhere. But some dark ads flew under the radar, like one sent out, we now know, by the Russians in their attempt to influence our election. These were separate from the posts the Russians reportedly sent of fake news stories that made Clinton look bad.

The ads on divisive issues were spread using Facebook tools similar to the ones Parscale and the Clinton campaign used. Facebook has admitted that the Russians spent $100,000, at least $100,000, on ads to influence the U.S. campaign. Does that bother you? Yeah, I would not want a foreign entity to meddle in our election. You know, government.

I mean, I wouldn't want that. I'm American. But the question is, did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians? And as the digital director, was Parscale involved? I think it's a joke. At least for my part in it. Very few people think it's a joke. I think it's a joke when they involve myself, because I know my own activities. And I know the activities of this campaign. I was there. It's just a farce. It's a farce that you colluded with the Russians. Yeah, it's just a joke. What about what happened on Twitter, which was flooded with pro-Trump tweets generated by robots or bots?

Did you have a hand in generating these bots? I had nothing to do with bots. I don't think bots work. You were called the king of the bots on Twitter. I know. It's ridiculous. It's just the craziest thing ever. No one on our team ever sat down with me and said, Brad, we should make bots. But if you see that there are hundreds of thousands of bots floating around with pro-Trump messages, somebody generated it. Where would it come from?

I would imagine there were people, everyday people in America who thought they were trying to help. I don't know. If the bots came from the Russians, would you know? No. Do you think it might have? No idea. Could it have? Could be from anybody in the world. Both the House and Senate intelligence committees looking into Russia's meddling met Parscale for lengthy closed-door sessions. Parscale told us the Russian plot line is pushed by liberals who think they lost because he cheated. The irony, he says, is that it wasn't a foreign entity helping the campaign, but left-leaning American companies like Twitter, Google, and above all, Facebook. These social platforms were all vented by very liberal people on the West and East Coasts,

and we figured out how to use it to push conservative values. I don't think they ever thought that would happen. I would say the number one thing people come up to me is like, I just never thought Republicans would be the ones to figure out how to use all this. So a liberal invents all this stuff, and a conservative in the Middle West figures out how to use it. And I think we use it better than anyone ever had in history. Facing mounting criticism over dark ads with political content,

Facebook is in the process of updating its policies, including doing a better job disclosing who's paying for these ads and creating a central depository of all the ads so anyone can scrutinize their content. When a giant photograph of a child appeared looming over the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego last fall, art aficionados knew right away it was the work of an artist who calls himself J.R. You may have never heard of J.R., but his giant photographs have appeared in some 140 countries, sometimes in fancy art galleries, but more often than not,

pasted illegally on sidewalks and subways, buildings and rooftops. Plenty of famous artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring started out scrawling their work on the streets, often in the dead of night. But as we first reported in February, few have continually displayed their art in public spaces on the scale of JR. This is the photograph that popped up in September along the U.S.-Mexico border, a 64-foot-tall picture of a Mexican child named Coquito who lives just on the other side of the fence. Built on scaffolding on Mexican soil,

there was nothing U.S. Border Patrol agents could do about it. It was classic J.R., a person's picture pasted in a public place that made everyone stop and stare. J.R. has been doing this kind of thing all over the world for the past 14 years. He put the faces of Kenyans on rooftops in a Nairobi slum. In Cuba, where oversized images of Castro and Che are the norm, JR put up enormous pictures of everyday people. On New York sidewalks and Istanbul buildings, in Tunisia during the Arab Spring and a looted police station, JR.R. has pasted his pictures,

often without permission and at risk of being arrested. We met up with J.R. in a suburb of Paris in front of a giant mural he'd made out of photographs of more than 700 local residents. We don't know his real name, and that's just how J.R. wants it. In public, he never takes off his glasses or hat. There's a practical reason for it, but a little mystery also builds mystique in the world of art. What we do know is that J.R. is 35 years old and was born in France, the child of Tunisian immigrants. I don't think I've ever done an interview for 60 Minutes when I didn't actually know the name of the person I'm interviewing. You're not going to tell me your name. Would it help, you know?

I mean, in a lot of countries... It would help me. In countries where I got arrested... It's important for you to be an anonymous. Yeah, because, unfortunately, when I travel in a lot of other countries where what I do, just paper and glue, is not considered as art,

I get arrested, deported, put in jail. What's art in one country is a jailable offense in another. Exactly. JR's been committing jailable offenses since he was a teenager. He says he was repeatedly kicked out of high school and would sneak out at night with friends, spray-painting graffiti in hard-to-reach areas. Graffiti or tagging, what was the appeal of that?

We all have that sense of, I want to exist, I want to show that I'm here, that I'm present. Graffiti-ing was saying, I am here, I am a person. Exactly, I'm here, I exist. His foray into photography began, he says, by accident. I found a camera in the subway, a tiny camera. You really just found it? Yeah, no, it's true. And it's funny because a lot of friends tease me. Yeah, right. You started your career stealing a camera. I'm not sure the police would believe that story, but I know. But, you know, some things are true. Exactly. At some point, I realized I was

not the best in graffiti. You know, I had the balls to climb any building you want, but I would not do the craziest piece. But I was with friends who were amazing. Then I realized, wait, let me document the journey. The journey of it. Yeah, and so I went from I exist to they exist, and I realized the power of that. Once photography got into the picture, it was about these other people exist. Exactly. They exist.

They exist. Many of JR's friends in this Paris suburb, whom he began taking pictures of, felt they didn't exist in the eyes of French society. Most of those who live in this neighborhood are of African or Arab descent, first or second generation immigrants, and few wealthy Parisians ever venture here. In 2005, riots broke out in this neighborhood after two kids died while being chased by police. The violence spread across France. JR saw how the young people in the suburb were being portrayed on television and decided to use his camera to tell a different story. You would see the riots, everyone had hoodies,

and then so any kids coming from the suburb would look like a monster to you. So that's when I started photographing them from really close. And I said, I'm going to put your name, your age, your building number on the poster. And I'm going to paste it in Paris where they see you as a monster. And actually, you're going to play your own caricature. Why play your own caricature? Isn't that feeding a stereotype? It's actually, by feeding it, it breaks it.

And I wanted them to be in control of their own image. And you wanted people in Paris who maybe had never been to this neighborhood to understand what? The humanity, when you look at this face, makes you want to smile. By playing the monster, they don't look like monster anymore. J.R. enlarged the pictures and printed them out and with friends began pasting them up

illegally at night around Paris. Most were immediately taken down. But the mayor of one Parisian district gave J.R. permission to paste them on a wall outside a museum. It was J.R.'s first official public art exhibit. He was 23 years old. The people from Paris would go in front of those pictures and take a photo of themselves with them. And people were trying to find who is who and get a photo with them where they're supposed to be the monsters about to invade Paris.

So it kind of break the tension that there was. The idea of breaking tension through photography was a revelation to JR. In 2007, with money saved from odd jobs, he decided to head to Israel. Open up, you decided to head to Israel. It was after the second Intifada, and his plan was to paste photographs on the wall separating Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank. So I started making a list of people doing the same job on each side, hairdresser, taxi driver, security guard, teacher, student. And then I would go, and I would say, look, I want to paste you playing your own caricature

of how the other sees you, but I would paste you with the other taxi driver. Oh, yeah, sure, yeah, take my photo. But the other guy, he's never going to accept. They're really close-minded. They're never going to accept. Then when I go there, same thing. Each person on each side said, I'll do it,

but the person on the other side won't do it. Before he could begin pasting the photographs, JR and his team were arrested by Israeli authorities for not having a permit. They were loaded into the back of a wagon and hauled off to jail. After some questioning, they were released and given 15 days to leave the country. Instead, JR went to the Palestinian side of the wall and began to paste. I paste a giant photo of the taxi driver

and a second photo of the other taxi driver and, you know, a crowd of people, very quickly, big crowd, and then the first guy asks a question. But, my friend, who is this people? I say, oh, one is Israeli and one is Palestinian. And then you have a big silence in the crowd. And I say, so, who is this people? I say, oh, one is Israeli and one is Palestinian. And then you have a big silence in the crowd. And I say, so who is who? And they couldn't even recognize the enemy or

their brother. On the Israeli side, to ensure he wouldn't be arrested again, JR announced the day and time he was going to put up his photographs. He says so many reporters and onlookers showed up to watch, the authorities decided to just let him go ahead with his project. The attention he got from his work in the Middle East and France led to some sales of his photographs, which then allowed him to begin to travel further afield. Over the next few years in Kenya, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, he focused his lens on women, heroes, he says, who are often treated as second-class citizens. He photographed women's faces and placed them where they could no longer be ignored.

A Kenyan woman named Elizabeth Kamanga asked J.R. to paste her picture for all the world to see. The woman asked me, make my story travel. Have my eyes, have my story travel around the world to see. The woman asked me, make my story travel. Have my eyes, have my story travel around the world. There was someone that they never heard of to hear, like sending a bottle in the water. Her story did travel thousands of miles around the world. J.R. pasted her eyes onto a container ship called the Magellan that spent months at sea. In 2008, he ventured into Providencia, the oldest favela in Rio, a slum perched on a hillside controlled by a well-armed gang of drug dealers. J.R. photographed an elderly woman whose grandson was murdered by a rival gang.

She agreed to let him paste her image on the stairs leading into the neighborhood. Did you have permission from any of the gangs? No, from nobody. We start pasting the stairs like that. Great vibe, kids playing. You know, we're just pasting on the stairs. After ten stairs, huge, like, fights of guns. And, like, it started going from all over.

J.R. and his team were caught in crossfire between police and gang members. We run and we hide like it's the last day of my life. And the next day, we came back and we kept on doing the stairs. And I think that's what made the people in the community realize that, OK, we're not just here for a minute. And that first time when that woman was faced on the stairs, everybody in the community understood what the project was about. It was her. She was standing there straight and looking strong.

Her photo covered 80 steps. And after that, other residents allowed JR to post their faces and eyes on the sides of their homes. A display of strength and dignity, he says, that could be seen from the wealthier neighborhood below. That word dignity to you is important. You know, the people made me realize it's important in every single place. Dignity is something that all of us want. All of us. No matter what.

No matter the background. Why? Because the issues people are facing are life and death. Yeah, of course. Dignity goes through the way we're being seen by the others, the way we portray ourselves. I think some people hearing that are going to say, look, you're telling me that people, you know, who don't know where their next meal is coming from are struggling to survive, care about art?

You know what? Yes. If you're wondering how JR pays for all these projects, so were we. He now has a team of about 16 people working for him out of studios in Paris and New York. He doesn't like to give details of how much his projects cost, but some of the money comes from the sale of limited edition prints of his work. He doesn't accept any sponsorship from corporations, but he does have wealthy art patrons who help him out.

There's amazing people out there. There's people that support me. There's someone that gave me a building to put my studio that I don't pay rent so I don't have to look for sponsors. There are amazing people that I call the shadow philanthropists, the people who really want to change. Shadow philanthropists. Yeah, and that don't look for return.

They don't get into philanthropy to get more credit. J.R.'s work may focus on other people, but it's also made him a celebrity in his own right. He has more than a million followers on Instagram and routinely is seen in the company of rock stars and other artists. A documentary J.R. directed called Faces, Places was nominated in January for an Oscar. Fame has its benefits. J.R. doesn't always have to sneak around now. He's often allowed to display his work.

So when were you doing the work inside? Last year on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, the National Park Service let him paste old photographs of immigrants at this abandoned hospital. That's the leader girl. And what does it mean? You know, I just try to do art in places that it would raise questions rather to give answers. J.R. is now encouraging others to raise questions by pasting their own photographs. He has a website where groups of people with an idea or a cause can send in their pictures.

He says he'll enlarge and print them and ship them back. JR-inspired images have so far been pasted on walls in dozens of countries around the world. Are you still an artist if you're not taking the photo and you're just printing stuff up and sending it out to people and they're putting it up? I don't know. I mean, I am. As much as a printer, I'm a photographer, and I'm a wallpaper man. You're a wallpaper man. At the end of the day, I have wallpaper buildings, you know? That's what I do. So that's why I think the title artist is the most prestigious title I'll ever get. Because, you know, the truth is I paste building.

I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.