60 Minutes - 9/6/2015: The Attack on Sony, Cardinal Seán, Mindfulness

Episode Date: September 6, 2015

Steve Kroft investigates North Korea's cyberattack on Sony Pictures; then, Norah O'Donnell interviews the archbishop of Boston; and, Anderson Cooper discovers what it's like to be "in the moment". 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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If I sat you down and gave you a pencil and paper and said, write a list of a dozen people that could do this. Oh, yeah. I mean, there are way more than a dozen people. There are probably three, four, five thousand people that could do that attack today. I mean, it's certainly within the realm of possibility that a terrorist group could go out and put together a team and do some real damage. ISIS hacked CENTCOM's Twitter.

If you want to know what Pope Francis is planning to do to change the Catholic Church, you'd do well to ask his closest American advisor, Cardinal Sean O'Malley. In St. Peter's Square, he stands out in his humble brown robe and sandals and stays with the Pope at the Vatican guest house. That means you're roommates with the Pope. Well, yes, you see him at all the meals. You knew him before. I mean, did you know that he would be this kind of a leader? I am delighted that he is beyond my expectations.

Our lives are filled with distractions. Email, Twitter, texting, we're constantly connected to technology, which is probably why there's a growing movement in America to train people to get around the stresses of daily life. There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness. Is it being present? It is being present. That's exactly what it is.

I don't feel I'm very present. I feel like every moment I'm either thinking about something that's coming down the road or something that's been in the past. So ultimately, all this preparing is for what? We're only alive now. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Nora O'Donnell.

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There was also an absurd quality to the whole episode, which was over an ill-advised movie comedy about the assassination of North Korea's leader, which the North Koreans did not find funny. The weirdness of it all has obscured a much more significant point, that an impoverished foreign country had launched a devastating attack against a major company on U.S. soil. And as we first reported last April, not much can be done about it. In some ways, it's another milestone in the cyber wars, which are just beginning to heat up, not cool down.

The cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment exposed a new reality, that you don't have to be a superpower to inflict damage on U.S. corporations, a fact that has been duly noted within corporate boardrooms and the national security apparatus. What's the significance of the Sony hack in a nutshell? The significance is that a foreign power has reached out and touched an American target. The fact that the North Korean government felt that it could do something in the United States and get away with it. That's what's significant. James Lewis, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington,

has helped shape U.S. cyber policy for decades, dealing with criminals stealing money, Russians stealing intelligence, and the Chinese stealing the latest technology. This was different because it qualified as the use of force. It qualified as an attack. There was disruption. There was destruction of data. There was an intent to hurt the company.

And it succeeded, bringing a major U.S. entertainment company to its knees. Like other corporate victims of cyber attacks, Sony has released very little information and declined our request for interviews. We were allowed to film on Sony's 44-acre studio lot and inside this building where technicians were still repairing damaged computers. We do know that when people fired up their computers on the morning of November 24th, they were greeted with this skeletal image now referred to as the screen of death. It announced an undetected cyber attack

that actually began weeks earlier, when a malicious piece of software began stealing vast amounts of data from the Sony computer network. Now, it had begun the job of wiping Sony's corporate files. It was the attacker saying, I'm going to delete what you've made. I'm going to destroy your stuff. Kevin Mandia is one of the best-known cyber sleuths in the U.S., and his company, FireEye, was hired by Sony to respond immediately to the crisis. But there was only so much they could do. For lack of a better analogy, the wiping's the grand finale. That's the infamous, we ran into the house, we took what we wanted, and then we left the detonation charge behind us. And then that detonation charge goes off, you're not going back to the house anymore.

And that's what happened? That's what happened. More than 3,000 computers and 800 servers were destroyed by the attackers after they had made off with mountains of business secrets, several unreleased movies, unfinished scripts, and the personal records of 6,000 employees, all of whom were given a taste of living offline. Sony made the decision to take itself off the grid.

All connections to the Internet, all connections to the rest of Sony, and all connections to third parties were shut off, effectively disconnecting an international corporation from the outside world and plunging itself into a pre-digital age of landline telephones and hand-delivered messages written with pen and paper. Immediately, employees start to remember the things they took for granted. Does the gate let you in the garage? You can't get your email. People's benefits can't be processed appropriately. Time cards can't be done. What if payroll's the next day? There are so many things that depend on the internet that, quite frankly, most companies don't even know all of them until

they come off the internet and go, oh, wow, didn't see that coming. To Kevin Mandia, it looked like a military-style operation mounted by a foreign government. And when his company began comparing the Sony computer virus with the 500 million pieces of malware in its archives, it quickly came up with a nearly identical match, right down to the skull on the calling card. It was a cyber attack two years ago against South Korea's banks and broadcast networks called Dark Soul that wiped out 40,000 computers and caused $700 million in damage. We had the malware from the attacks that happened in South Korea in 2013. And these things, when put side by side, this looks like whoever hacked South Korea in 2013 is hacking Sony. And the attribution in those attacks in 2013 was to North Korea. Mandia's suspicions about North Korea, which has a well-established

cyber capability and a long history of attacking its neighbor, were soon confirmed by the NSA, the FBI, and the White House. And the attackers themselves hinted at it when they contacted Matt Zeitland of BuzzFeed.com and at least a half a dozen other online reporters, offering them everything they'd stolen from Sony. So this is the first email you got? Yep. Yeah. The weekend after Thanksgiving, it says that it has all this data from Sony. It would have all these links so we could download the information. What followed from Zeitlin and others was two weeks of damaging, embarrassing stories

from the corporate files and private emails of Sony executives, as well as threats and a specific demand from the attackers that Sony not release its comedy about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. They hate us because they ain't us. Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. That part may have been true. Sony scares CEOs. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's the difference. Every CEO is walking around. How do I feel if my email is out on the Internet? How would I feel if

my machines got disrupted? So all of a sudden, every chief information security officer is now talking to their board because every board wants to know, hey, is this the new normal? And it may well be. Kevin Mandia says even big corporations with sophisticated IT departments are no match for the dozens of countries that now have offensive cyber war capabilities. All advantage goes to the offense in cyber. It just does. On the defensive side, you have to say, I must defend all 100,000 machines, all 50,000 employees. The offensive side thinks I only need to break into one, and I'm on the inside. And any company or any corporation is as strong as its weakest link?

In a way, yes, in security. The nation state threat actors, or hackers, target human weakness, not system weakness. And there's no shortage of weaknesses. Most company employees are allowed to browse online or visit Facebook on corporate computers, and many take them home for personal use. All it takes to contaminate a network is for one person to unwittingly access an infected file that looks realistic,

like an Adobe Flash player update or an email that pretends to be from Apple support. And then what happens when they click on them? They compromise their machine. And now that machine, being on the inside of a corporate network, can be used as a beachhead to increase access. And that's what happened at Sony. Eventually, the North Koreans were able to obtain the passwords and credentials

of the company's computer system administrators and build them right into the malware that carried out the attack. With help from anybody? You know, anything's possible. I simply don't know. How sophisticated was the malware that they used? Was this brand new stuff? It was sophisticated enough that it works on the vast majority of companies. You know, the FBI is quoted as saying this would work at over 90 percent of the companies that they deal with. If you want to talk about state-of-the-art hacking or what's going on in the international cyber arms market, John Miller is a good place to start.

He turned down a job with the NSA in a government car while he was still in high school because he says he was already making more money doing private consulting work and honing his skills as a penetration tester. So you're a hacker? I was. Now I'm a, you know, a computer security professional. But yeah, I mean, for the majority of my career, I was an ethical hacker where I would actually go out and hack companies and then work with them to make sure they didn't get hacked by somebody else. Since Miller says he's been well paid to hack into nuclear power plants by utility companies, we wanted to know what he thought about the Sony attack and the malware the North Koreans used to pull it off. If I sat you down and gave you a pencil and paper and said,

write a list of a dozen people that could do this. Oh yeah, I mean, they're way more than a dozen people. There are probably three, four, 4,000, 5,000 people that could do that attack today. And not all of them are in friendly countries. No, not all of them are in friendly countries. And the number is growing rapidly. I mean, it's certainly within the realm of possibility that a terrorist group could go out and put together a team and do some real damage. I mean, ISIS hacked CENTCOM's Twitter.

The barrier to entry is low. Miller's previous job was leading a research team for a company that made and sold offensive cyber weapons to the U.S. government. He's currently a vice president of Cylance, a company that makes next-generation antivirus software for banks and Fortune 500 companies. It's currently marketing a product it claims would have detected and stopped the Sony hack while it was in progress. How sophisticated was this attack? Not very. When you look at it in contrast to the capabilities that the United States

government are deploying, it is nowhere close to being sophisticated. My favorite analogy is the malware that was used to hack Sony is like a moped, and the malware being deployed by United States intelligence agencies is like an F-22 fighter jet. It's much more sophisticated. It's much harder to detect. And yet still, if this is a moped, there were only a handful of companies in the United States that would have been able to survive this attack. And that really is the scary part, is it does not take an overly sophisticated attack to compromise these huge global multinational brands. Miller says there have been other major cyber attacks like the one against Sony,

but they didn't get as much attention. In 2012, Iran was blamed for an attack against the headquarters of Saudi Arabia's national oil company, Aramco, that destroyed 30,000 computers. Iran has also been accused of a cyber assault against a group of casinos owned by Sheldon Adelson, a vocal enemy of the regime in Tehran. And there have been others. I've worked with companies before in the oil and gas space that have had control system networks get compromised by malware and they've lost control of their floating oil platforms. I remember reading about that. Yeah. Yeah. No, you didn't read about it. There was no need to disclose. No customer information got leaked. So these things happen more often than

the public knows. Absolutely. There's a lot the public doesn't know about, including an active international underground market in cyber weapons like the one that was used to take down Sony's computers. Miller took us to a site on the dark web where you can buy them. This is actually a list of black market exploits that I was contacted from a Russian hacker that he was trying to sell and his price, right? So what does this one do? So this is a vulnerability in that software that would allow someone to take over control of your computer. 39,000, 29,000, 39,000. Yeah, majority of them are 30.

That's $30,000 payable in Bitcoin, the virtual currency of choice on the dark web. For the most part, the Internet is completely unregulated. It's the Wild West. It truly, truly is the Wild West right now. What we're seeing are people getting pulled out onto the street and shot. And it's like, where's the sheriff? There's no sheriff. James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies knows better than most that there are no easy solutions. He says the U.S. can deter catastrophic cyber attacks from China and Russia by responding in kind.

But how do you respond to a rogue state like North Korea for an attack against major corporations like Sony? Turning off the lights in North Korea, no one would notice. It happens all the time, right? Going after a North Korean movie studio, it would probably be a relief for the people there. The only pressure point we really have is going after the leadership, going after the revenue streams coming to the leadership. And that's what the Obama administration has done, at least publicly. Lewis and others believe that it will take a technological breakthrough in cyber warfare defense to solve a problem technology created. But that could take years. Legislation forcing companies to improve cybersecurity has gone nowhere.

There's a reluctance in the Congress to force companies to do anything. The administration shares that reluctance. We were lucky until this year. Hopefully we'll be a little luckier for a bit longer. In the time being, keep your fingers crossed. I used to say that the U.S. had a faith based defense when it came to cyber security because we had faith that the people who didn't like us weren't going to do anything bad. That's what Sony has changed, is that we had somebody who doesn't like us step out and say, how far can I go with the Americans? And that's where faith isn't enough.

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As Catholics prepare for Pope Francis's first visit to the United States later this month, it seems a good time to take another look at his closest American advisor, Cardinal Sean O'Malley. The Pope has appointed the shy Franciscan friar president of the Church's crucial commission to combat child abuse and named him a member of the Council of Cardinals, the Pope's small kitchen cabinet charged with helping redraw the way the Church is governed. Soft-spoken and unassuming, he is usually dressed in the brown habit of his Capuchin Franciscan order and not in a cardinal's red robes. He goes by Cardinal Sean, and like Pope Francis, he is more inclined to conversation than condemnation. As we first reported last fall, he commutes to Rome from his day job as Archbishop of Boston to help Francis remake an ancient institution.

It's a very different world now because of his style. Part of that style includes the Pope's reliance on advisors like Cardinal Sean O'Malley. O'Malley not only works closely with the Pope, but stays with him at the Vatican guest house when he comes to Rome on business. When you come here to Rome, you stay at the Domus Santa Marta, which is just right over there. Yes, ordinarily. That means you're roommates with the Pope. Well, yes, you see him at all the meals, and very often we'll celebrate Mass with him in the morning, and we have our meetings right there.

Cardinal O'Malley and then-Cardinal Jorge Borgoglio of Buenos Aires became fast friends when the Boston Archbishop visited Argentina on church business in 2010. If you want to understand Pope Francis, you do well to look at Cardinal O'Malley. You knew him before. I mean, did you know that he would be this kind of a leader? I knew that he would be different. I am delighted that he is beyond my expectations. Both share the same outlook, open, nonjudgmental,

given to simple living, and not afraid to consider change. One change is the Pope's recognition that child abuse is a churchwide problem that can no longer be ignored or covered up by bishops. O'Malley has more experience than any bishop in the church when it comes to cleaning up child abuse, and Pope Francis turned to him to lead a new Child Protection Commission for the entire church. It's something that I brought to the Commission of Cardinals, and we talked about it, and the Cardinals were very, very supportive, and the Holy Father, he's a great listener. Has the Vatican resisted it in the past? I think even here, particularly in the past,

there was the feeling that this was an American problem. But is there a recognition inside the Vatican that this is intolerable? Certainly the Holy Father is very, very aware of that and very committed to zero tolerance and responding in a proper way to this phenomenon of child abuse. Despite his office and influence in Rome, Cardinal O'Malley is a modest man, reluctant to put himself forward. He is humble, a true Franciscan who would rather be addressed as Cardinal Sean than

your eminence. It took more than a year to convince him to agree to an interview, but he is so approachable you can talk with him about nearly anything. Now your shoes look a lot more comfortable than mine. Well, 50 years of wearing sandals. Yes. Would you ever have to wear closed-toed shoes? Well, when I'm disguised as a cardinal. Yes. Which isn't very often. His reputation for cleaning up the church began when he was installed as bishop of Fall River, Massachusetts,

where O'Malley inherited one of the most notorious child abuse cases in history. Instead of lawyering up, O'Malley began reaching out directly to victims, settling cases and acting as a pastor, not a CEO. His success led to a transfer to Palm Beach, where the previous two bishops resigned after accusations of abuse. Then in 2002, the Vatican sent him to Boston. Were you worried? Yes. Terrified. Terrified because the Archdiocese of Boston, the one-time symbol of American Catholicism, was dissolving, thanks to what was then the biggest sex abuse scandal in church history.

There were a thousand lawsuits against us. The seminary was empty. As I say, such anger, disappointment, upset on the part of the people. This was a pretty tough assignment. It was, as somebody described it, as a fixer-upper. And he began fixing it up on his first day on the job 11 years ago by doing something bishops seldom do admitting what had happened and apologizing for it and at the beginning of this installation ceremony i again ask forgiveness for all the harm done to young people by clergy, religious, and hierarchy.

Sean O'Malley set a new tone in Boston. The first thing he did was sell the palatial Archbishop's residence and the 28 sprawling acres it sat on. The Archbishop's residence was more house than I needed. Did you realize how big an impact it would have? Well, I knew it would have an economic impact on the diocese. And at the time, I was very grateful that we had this mansion to unload. And because we sold it for over $100 million. O'Malley moved into the modest cathedral rectory. He has a deep devotion to working with the poor, particularly immigrants,

and is a prominent voice in any of eight languages in the Catholic Church's call for immigration reform. Last year, he led a mass at the border wall in Nogales, Arizona. Even distributing communion through the fence to call attention to the problem and the church's position on reform. The Pope, who has been a strong voice for immigrant rights, called it a powerful picture. But it is O'Malley's work to reform the church on child abuse where he has made the biggest impact. For many people outside the church and inside the church, the biggest scandal isn't the predators. It's the bishops. The bishops who protected them and lied about them and moved them from parish to parish.

And many of these predators have been prosecuted, but the bishops have not. Why is that? One of the first things that came up is the importance of accountability. And we're looking at how the church could have protocols, how to respond when a bishop has not been responsible for the protection of children in his diocese. I want to ask you about Robert Finn, who is the bishop of Kansas City St. Joseph. And as you know, he pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor for not reporting one of his priests to authorities.

Bishop Finn wouldn't be able to teach Sunday school in Boston. That's right. How is that zero tolerance that he's still in place? What does it say to Catholics? Well, it's a question that the Holy See needs to address urgently. And there's a recognition? There's a question that the Holy See needs to address urgently. And there's a recognition? There's a recognition of that. From Pope Francis?

From Pope Francis. The Cardinal's careful candor isn't limited to the Church's mishandling of abuse. Take the Vatican Doctrine Office's crackdown on American nuns for focusing more on social justice than issues like abortion and contraception, placing the nuns under the supervision of three bishops. It looked like a crackdown from man at the Vatican on... A disaster. A disaster.

A disaster. Should there be more women in positions of power in the Curia? Yes, I think there should be, and hopefully there will be. When? Well, I can't tell you what time, but hopefully soon. So far, there is little in the way of concrete change, but Cardinal O'Malley spends one week every other month in Rome. Otherwise, he and the Pope stay in contact using a technology that seems almost as dated

as illuminated manuscripts. Usually, we fax. Really? Yes. You fax with the Pope? Yes. People still communicate by fax? Still communicate by fax.

Like with letters? Really? Don't. People still communicate by fax? Still communicate by fax. Like with letters? Mm-hmm. Really? No. Very quick and efficient and a little more private than... Really? Most people think... Safer. Oh, really?

Mm-hmm. Most people think texting is quicker than faxing. Well, the Pope and I aren't into texting. His choice of communication technology is not the only thing conservative about him. Church traditionalists accuse him of being a closet liberal for participating in ecumenical services and presiding at the funeral of abortion rights supporter Ted Kennedy. But the Cardinal is a hardliner on Catholic doctrine. Like Pope Francis, he upholds traditional positions on abortion, gay marriage, birth control, and women's ordination.

The Church says it's not open to the discussion about ordaining women. Why not? Not everyone needs to be ordained to have that important role in the life of the church. Women run the Catholic charities, the Catholic schools, the development office for the archdiocese. Some would say women do a lot of the work but have very little power. Well, power is not a word that we like to use in the church. It's more service. But they can't preach. They can't administer the sacraments. I mean, some women feel like they're second-class Catholics

because they can't do those things that are very important. Well, but they have other very important roles. That, you know, a priest cannot be a mother either. The tradition of the church is that we have always ordained men and that the priesthood reflects the incarnation of Christ who in his humanity is a man. But in spite of that, does the exclusion of women seem at all immoral?

Well, Christ would never ask us to do something immoral. And I know that women... The sense of equality. I mean, just the sense of sort of the fairness of it, you know. You wouldn't exclude someone based on race, but yet you do exclude people based on gender. Well, it's a matter of vocation and what God has given to us.

And this is, you know, if I were founding a church, you know, I'd love to have women priests. But Christ founded it, and what he has given us is something different. But God is not afraid of change, as Pope Francis has told his bishops. And Cardinal O'Malley is thrilled with his old friend. I always had admiration for him, but to see how he has made this extraordinary impact on the church is so gratifying. It will change the future of this church. I have no doubt. Since we first aired this story last November, Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, St. Joseph,

whom Cardinal O'Malley agreed wouldn't be allowed to teach Sunday school in Boston, has resigned. The Vatican Doctrine Office has ended its direct oversight of American nuns, and the Pope has approved new procedures drawn up by O'Malley's commission to remove bishops who failed to protect youth from predator priests. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more.

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There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness. Is it being present? It is being present. That's exactly what it is. I don't feel I'm very present in each moment. I feel like every moment I'm either thinking about something that's coming down the road or something that's been in the past. So ultimately, all this preparing is for what? For the next moment, like the last moment, and then we're dead. So in a certain way, are we going to experience while we're still alive?

We're only alive now. Jon Kabat-Zinn is an MIT-trained scientist who's been practicing mindfulness for 47 years. Back in 1979, he started teaching mindfulness through meditation to people suffering from chronic pain and illness. That program is now used in more than 700 hospitals worldwide. So how can you be mindful in your daily life? When your alarm goes off and you jump out of bed, what is the nature of the mind in that moment? Are you already like, oh my God, your calendar pops into your mind and you're driven already? Or can you take a moment and just lie in bed and just feel your body breathing and remember, oh yeah, brand new day and I'm still

alive. So I get out of bed with awareness, brush my teeth with awareness. When you're in the shower next time, check and see if you're in the shower. What do you mean check and see if you're in the shower? Well, you may not be. You may be in your first meeting at work. You may have 50 people in the shower with you. Kapit Zinn says mindfulness takes practice. A lot of people start with a training class to learn how to meditate. He agreed to teach us at a weekend retreat on a remote mountaintop in Northern California. When we arrived, we were told there'd be no television to watch, no internet, not even an alarm clock. So I'm checking in. The retreat was full of professionals, neuroscientists, business leaders, Silicon Valley executives.

Before we began, we all had to surrender our last ties to the outside world. Put your devices in the basket, you know. I'm contributing my MacBook Air and my iPhone, happily. I wasn't exactly happy to give up my phone. I usually check email several times an hour. So let's take a few minutes and just settle into an erect and dignified posture. The retreat lasted three days, and most of that time was spent just sitting there, silently meditating, with occasional guidance from Kabot Zinn. There's no place to go. There's nothing to do. We're just asking you to sit and know that you're sitting.

Knowing that you're sitting may sound simple. Turns out, it's not. The mind constantly wanders. The mind has a life of its own. It goes here and there. To not get lost in thought, Kabat-Zinn recommended focusing on the sensation of breathing in and out. Can we actually ride with full awareness on the waves of the breath at the belly, at the nostrils, in the chest, and then simply rest here in awareness? Resting in awareness is one of those phrases used a lot by people who practice mindfulness. But when I tried to do it, it wasn't restful, and I worried I wasn't doing it right.

I kept thinking about work. I miss my cell phone. Not alone. I'm in a little withdrawal, I will say. Kabat-Zinn, who's written 10 books on mindfulness and led nearly 100 retreats, describes meditation as a mental workout. The mind wanders away from the breath, and then you gently and non-judgmentally just bring it back.

So it's okay that the mind drifts away, but you just bring it back? It's the nature of the mind to drift away. The mind is like the Pacific Ocean. It waves. And mindfulness has been shown to drop underneath the waves. If you drop underneath the agitation in the mind, into your breath, deep enough, calmness, gentle undulations. After hours of meditating and 30-minute sessions, it does get easier. Those waves of thought Kabat-Zinn described, they're still there, but you get less distracted by them. At breakfast, we spent time relearning some of the very basic things in life,

including how to eat food. Eating a meal in complete silence is a little awkward, but without conversation as a distraction, you taste more and eat less. This is something called walking meditation. The goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling. I know it seems ridiculous, but it does change the way you experience walking. The Zen people from ancient China, when you're walking, just walk. Turns out to be the hardest thing. That's an ancient saying? When you're eating, just eat.

Not from the TV, not with the newspaper. Turns out that's huge. Congressman Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, says mindfulness might look a lot like nothing, but he really believes it can change America for the better. He attended his first meditation retreat in 2008, just days after winning a grueling reelection campaign. But being mindful at a retreat is one thing. We wondered if back in Washington, Congressman Ryan ever worries about how all this looks. Well, you know, I can see myself in high school going, whoa, stay away from those

guys. So how do you use it here in Capitol Hill? I'm on the budget committee, for example. There's a lot of conflict and people say things that get you ramped up. I find myself as my body clinches up when somebody says something that I know is wrong or I want to catch them in a lie or whatever that just calm down. When it's your turn, you make your point. Amen. You don't hear the words calm and Congress together very often. But Ryan is trying to change that.

He hosts weekly meditation sessions open to members and staff of both parties. Now shifting the attention to take in the entire body. Have you gotten any Republican congressmen in to meditate with you yet? No. Shifting the attention to take in the entire body. Have you gotten any Republican congressmen in to meditate with you yet? No. We're working on it. He's written a book about mindfulness and obtained a million dollars of federal funding to teach it to school children in his Ohio district. I feel like we're calm right now.

Yes, you are. I've seen it transform classrooms. I've seen it heal veterans. I've seen what it does to individuals who have really high chronic levels of stress and how it has helped their body heal itself. I wouldn't be willing to stick my neck out this far if I didn't think this is the thing that can really help shift the country. To some people, though, this may sound like kind of new age gobbledygook. There's so many different compelling studies that are showing that this is not new age gobbledygook.

This is potentially transformative of our health and well-being psychologically as well as physically. It can be useful for anxiety, depression, stress reduction. There have been a number of studies that show mindfulness can lead to those benefits, as well as improvements in memory and attention. And at the University of Massachusetts, Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, uses mindfulness to treat addiction. This is just the next generation of exercise. We've got the physical

exercise components down, and now it's about working out how can we actually train our minds. Dr. Brewer is trying to understand how mindfulness can alter the functioning of the brain. He uses a cap lined with 128 electrodes. We're going to start filling each of these 128 wells with conduction gel. The electrodes are able to pick up signals from the posterior cingulate, part of a brain network linked to memory and emotion. This is all just picking up electrical signal from the top of your head. Since attending the mindfulness retreat, I'd been meditating daily

and was curious to see if it had an impact on my brain. We're going to have you start with thinking of something that was very anxiety-provoking for you. Okay. When I thought about something stressful, the cells in my brain's posterior cingulate immediately started firing, shown by the red lines that went off the chart on the computer screen. Just drop into meditation. Okay. When I let go of those stressful thoughts and

refocused on my breath, within seconds the brain cells that had been firing quieted down, shown by the blue lines on the computer. That's really fascinating to see like that. Dr. Brewer believes everyone can train their brains to reach that blue mindfulness zone, but he says all the technology we're surrounded by makes it difficult. If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody's having conversations anymore. They're sitting at dinner looking at their phone because their brain is so addicted to it. You really think there's something in the brain that's addicted to that?

Well, it's the same reward pathways as addiction, absolutely. I'm, you know, on mobile devices all day long, and I feel like I could go through an entire day and not be present. And what's that like? It's exhausting. Yeah. So all of this is leading to a societal exhaustion. The irony is many of the people responsible for creating the gadgets that distract us are themselves practicing mindfulness. More than 2,000 people from companies like Google, Facebook, and Instagram showed up in San Francisco for a mindfulness conference called Wisdom 2.0.

Please welcome our guests. Karen May is a Google vice president, and that's Chade Main Ton, a former engineer who's become kind of a mindfulness guru. As could only happen at a place like Google, his actual title is Jolly Good Fellow. Which nobody can deny. So what does a Jolly Good Fellow do? My job description is to enlighten minds, open hearts, and create world peace. That's your job description?

That's my job description. I've heard that at some meetings at Google, you actually start out with moments of silence. We do. How long do you sit there quietly for? It's literally a minute or two of noticing your breathing, calming yourself down, being present. And then you're able to go into the meeting, the business at hand, with a little bit more focus. Does it make people more productive? Yes, it does. When the

mind is unagitated, when the mind is calm, that mind is most conducive to creative problem solving. To innovate. Correct. And one of the powers of mindfulness is the ability to get to that frame of mind on demand. So along with their free health clubs and other company perks, Google now offers their 52,000 employees free lessons in mindfulness. In the middle of stress, when everything's falling apart, you can take one breath. You know, I can imagine some people rolling their eyes and saying, oh, come on, of course, Google, you guys have tons of money, and there's massage therapists walking around, and all sorts of nice things for employees, but it just doesn't seem practical.

The advantage of this is it actually doesn't cost anything and it doesn't take much time. And you believe it really works? I absolutely believe it works. After nearly four decades of teaching mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn is happy to see it hitting the mainstream. But if you're starting to think mindfulness is something you should start practicing, he says you may be missing the point. It's not a big should.

It's not like, oh, I got to, now one more thing that I have to put in my life. Now I have to be mindful, you know. And if it becomes that one more thing they got to do after they take the yoga class. Don't do it. Don't do it. It's not a doing at all. In fact, it's a being. And being doesn't take any time. Now, an update on a story that we called Killing Bin Laden.

When we first reported it three years ago, the former Navy SEAL we know as Mark Owen told us about his role in the SEAL's assault on Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. The Justice Department began a criminal investigation of Owen for potentially revealing classified information in his book, No Easy Day, and in our 60 Minutes interview. Now, that investigation has been closed without charges. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.