60 Minutes - Sunday, August 18, 2019

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

In an interview with Lesley Stahl, the CEO of Israeli spy ware-maker NSO talks about "Pegasus," a software that is licensed to intelligence agencies worldwide. Plus -- Sharyn Alfonsi reports on the plastic plague and its impacts on the ocean and wildlife. Those stories 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

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with

Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Pegasus is a powerful cyber surveillance tool that is licensed by an Israeli developer to governments all around the world. They can use it to track terrorists, but also critics, possibly including Jamal Khashoggi. I can tell you very clear, we had nothing to do with this horrible murder. It's been reported that you yourself sold Pegasus to the Saudis for $55 million. Don't believe newspapers. Is that a denial? No. Take a look around. Odds are you're surrounded by plastic. That water bottle we use once and

throw away will be with us for generations. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. There are campaigns to limit this plastic plague with bans on bags and straws. And yet around the world, it continues to pile up, seeping into our rivers and streams and turning our oceans into a vast garbage dump. But one mop-haired young Dutchman has come up with a plan which he says will save our seas. Hi, Boyan. His name is Boyan Slat. He has no formal training and his much-hyped multi-million dollar device has made him something of a sensation. So we decided to see what all the fuss is about. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time, and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while

managing the uncertainties. Backed by more than 150 years of experience, you can count on Pacific Life to be there so you can go out and keep living your best life. Pacific Life is one of the most dependable and experienced insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love. Or visit www.pacificlife.com. Tonight we'll take you inside the growing, shadowy global market of cyber espionage. We look specifically at a controversial Israeli company called the NSO Group,

valued at nearly a billion dollars, that says it developed a hacking tool that can break into just about any smartphone on earth. As we first reported in March, NSO licenses this software called Pegasus to intelligence and law enforcement agencies worldwide so they can infiltrate the encrypted phones and apps of criminals and terrorists. Problem is, this same tool can also be deployed by a government to crush dissent. And so it is that Pegasus has been linked to human rights abuses, unethical surveillance, and even to the notoriously brutal murder of the Saudi Arabian critic Jamal Khashoggi.

Headquartered in the Israeli city of Herzliya, NSO Group operates in strict secrecy. But co-founder and CEO Shalev Julio has been forced out of the shadows and not into a good light, accused of selling Pegasus to Saudi Arabia, despite its abysmal record on human rights. And the word is that you sold Pegasus to them, and then they turned it around to get Khashoggi. Khashoggi murder is horrible, really horrible. And therefore, when I first heard there are accusations that our technology being used on Jamal Khashoggi or on his relatives, I started an immediate

check about it. And I can tell you very clear, we had nothing to do with this horrible murder. It's been reported that you yourself went to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. You yourself sold Pegasus to the Saudis for $55 million. Don't believe newspapers. Is that a denial? No. Pegasus is so expensive because it lets authorities do what they long couldn't, No. Pegasus allows detectives and agents to track locations, listen in to and record conversations,

basically turning the phone against its user. In the company's eight-year history, they have never let cameras in, but they wanted to show us they're like any high-tech company, with PlayStations and Pilates. But there was a lot we couldn't show. Notice, no faces. The work is top secret, and some employees are ex-military intelligence and Mossad. Pegasus is such a sensitive spy tool, NSO has to get approval before it can be licensed to any client, let alone Saudi Arabia, from the Israeli Defense Ministry, as though it's an arms deal. Why would the government of Israel want, you know, what seems to be an enemy to have this technology? I'm not going to talk about specific customer. But can you say that you won't and haven't sold Pegasus to a country that is known to violate human rights and imprison journalists and go after activists?

I only say that we are selling Pegasus in order to prevent crime and terror. Penetrating an iPhone was an issue in the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California in 2015. Right now we have one down outside the car. The FBI said it couldn't get into the shooter's phone, and Apple refused to help over privacy concerns, an issue that had come up before. Intelligence agencies came to us and said, we do have a problem with the new smartphones.

We cannot longer get valuable intelligence. They were encrypted. Exactly. How many lives do you think Pegasus has saved? Ten of thousands of people. Really? Yes. Julio referred us to the head of a Western European intelligence agency

who, off camera, confirmed that Pegasus is a game-changer in foiling attacks by European jihadists, as well as shutting down drug and human trafficking rings. But here's the question. How often has Pegasus also been used to go after a government's critics? If you were in Saudi Arabia, you'd be in jail. Well, I don't think I will be in jail. I don't think anyone will find my body like what Jamal Khashoggi has faced.

Ghanem Al-Masarir is a Saudi comic living in London who has a popular YouTube satire show that takes aim at Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Last year, as the regime was kidnapping, locking up, and torturing Saudi dissidents, Ghanem says he and other critics abroad got text messages like this fake DHL notice that if clicked would download Pegasus onto their phones so they could be spied on. And you clicked on it. Of course. Yeah, who's sending me a package?

Now, Pegasus is designed to catch terrorists. So who defined the terrorist? Do you think I am a terrorist? Do I look like a terrorist? I don't know what a terrorist looks like. But I mean, the problem is the Saudis consider people asking for freedom of speech as terrorists. They consider anybody who is a threat to their regime as a terrorist. What do you do when your customer has a definition of terrorist that isn't our definition?

In some countries, the opposition are terrorists. No such thing. Every customer that we sold had a very clear definition of what terrorism is. And it's basically bad guys doing bad things in order to kill innocent people, in order to change the political agenda. I never met with a customer that told me that oppositions are terrorists. Well, they're not going to tell you. But if they will act like that, they will not going to be a customer. There are more than 100 countries, 100 countries that we will never sell our technologies to. The problem is there are not proper controls around how this technology is

being used. Ron Deibert heads Citizen Lab, a human rights watchdog at the University of Toronto, where researchers like computer scientist Bill Marz, say they figured out a way to detect if a phone has been targeted by Pegasus, which they did in the case of Ghanim al-Masarir and other Saudi dissidents. This technology is being used by autocratic dictators who can mount global cyber espionage operations simply by purchasing the technology. So you are saying that once they sell this technology, once the Israelis sell it, they know how it's being used. Well, the question is, do they care to look?

I think if they cared to look, they would have the opportunity to see how it was being used. But Shalev Julio says NSO is unable to see who their clients are targeting. Only after there's an allegation of misuse can NSO demand target data in order to investigate. And I can tell you that in the last eight years that the company exists, we only had real three cases of misuse. Three cases. Out of thousands of cases of saving lives, three were the misuse. And those people or those organizations that misuse the system,

they are no longer a customer and they will never be a customer again. The first case we uncovered in Mexico... But Citizen Lab says it was able to find many more cases. In Mexico, there's a problem... But Citizen Lab says it was able to find many more cases, 27 in Mexico alone, where Pegasus was used to target political rivals, reporters, and civil rights lawyers. They also say they found the Pegasus link on the phone of this human rights activist, Ahmed Mansour, from the United Arab Emirates. I think that people that are not part of criminal or terrorist activities have nothing to worry about. Tammy Shahar, who was NSO's co-president,

told us Pegasus is used with surgical precision. It's not mass surveillance technology. This is really for the bin Ladens of the world. But the reason that your company has been criticized and the reason that we're here doing this interview is because countries have used your technology on human rights activists, on journalists. There are allegations that have been brought.

There are reports that were said. And we take every such allegation very seriously, and we look into it. Nothing has been proven. To protect against misuse, she says, NSO has three layers of vetting potential customers. One by the Israeli Defense Ministry, a second by its own business ethics committee, and thirdly... Our contractual agreements have our customers sign that the only intended use of the system will be against terror and crime. Oh, they sign. Come on. You have an autocratic government and they say, oh, we're not going to use it except against criminals. And you just believe them? No. As I said, the contractual agreement comes after two

layers. And, you know, I would love for you to sit in one of our business ethics committee. We have a tough discussion because imagine a country is facing major terrorist threats. In the same time, they have some corruption issues. And you have to sit in that room and weigh what is more important to help them fight terror or maybe there is a chance that it's going to be misused. It's not a black and white answer. It's a tough ethical question. There are other ethical questions in deploying Pegasus. To hone in on a target, for instance, authorities often infect the phones of innocent people around them, like family members. It's been reported that Mexican authorities used Pegasus to capture drug lord Joaquin Guzman, better known as El Chapo, by tapping the phones of a few people he talked to while he was on the lam. I read it in the newspaper, the same as you. In order to catch El Chapo, for example, they had to intercept a journalist, an actress, and a lawyer. Now, by themselves, they, you know, they're not criminals, right? But if they are in touch with a drug lord, and in order to catch them,

you need to intercept them, that's a decision that intelligence agencies should get. What if you can prevent the 9-11 terror attack? And for that, you had to intercept the son, the 16-year-old son of bin Laden. Would that be legit or not? Targeting someone's inner circle has become an issue in the Khashoggi case. Omar Abdelaziz, an influential Saudi online critic based in Canada, was texting with Khashoggi up to his death. Now Abdelaziz is suing an SO, alleging that the Saudis used Pegasus to hack his phone and thereby spy on Khashoggi. We asked Shalev Julio if his investigation explored the wider circumference around the slain journalist.

I can tell you that we've checked, and we have a lot of ways to check. And I can guarantee to you, our technology was not used on Jamal Khashoggi or his relatives. Or the dissidents? Or the relatives. Like Omar Abdelaziz and... I'm not going to get into specific and tell you that if we will figure out that somebody misused the system, we will shut down the system immediately. We have the right to do it and we have the technology to do it. It begs the question, did you shut down the Saudis? I'm not going to talk about customers, and I'm not going to go into specifics. We do what we need to do. We help create a look around. Odds are you're surrounded by plastic. It's in our kitchens and in our bedrooms. It keeps our food fresh and our medicine safe. It is, in many ways, a miracle product,

cheap to produce and virtually indestructible. Yet plastic's blessings are also a curse. That water bottle we use once and throw away will be with us for generations. There are campaigns to limit this plastic plague with bans on bags and straws. And yet, around the world, it continues to pile up, seeping into our rivers and streams and turning our oceans into a vast garbage dump. But as we first reported in December, one mop-haired young Dutchman has come up with a plan which he claims will save our seas. His name is Boyan Slat. He has no formal training, but his much-hyped, multi-million dollar device has made him something of a sensation. So we decided to see what all the fuss was about.

In an old naval base just outside San Francisco, engineers have spent months assembling a curious contraption. The brainchild of a driven, then 24-year-old Dutchman named Boyan Slat, who dropped out of college to take center stage in a grand new venture. So how many of those clamps do we have? 200 clamps. It was just 2,000 feet of plastic piping, affixed to a 10-foot nylon screen. But Slat's lofty promise? That he could clean up the world's oceans. His idea, as he laid it out in this animation, was to tow his device out to an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest of five ocean whirlpools where much of the world's plastic accumulates. Despite what you may have heard, the Garbage Patch isn't an island,

and it's even difficult to see with the naked eye. It's a vast soup of floating debris, much of it tiny and below the surface. If all went according to plan, it was designed to use the wind, waves, and water currents to skim the plastic and corral it into an area where it could be removed, the first phase of an ambitious goal. I hope to deploy, say, around 60 of these cleanup systems in the next two to three years. Sixty? Yeah, which, if we are successful with that,

we should be able to remove half this Great Pacific Garbage Patch every five years. And what about the other half? So, of course, we don't stop after five years. The eventual goal of this cleanup is to get to a 90% reduction by the year 2040. That's pretty aggressive. Yeah. We first joined Slat last September just before he was due to take his system out to sea. It was fitted with an array of gadgets to alert ships to its presence and to allow slat and his team to monitor its progress in the middle of the pacific ocean critics were already calling

slat's multi-million dollar moonshot misguided there are a lot of people as you know who said oh this can't work it won't work it's a waste time. Is there a part of you that is waiting for that I told you so moment? I try not to lower myself to that level. How's that going? Yeah, it's going all right. Slat came up with the idea as a teenager eight years ago on a diving trip off the coast of Greece. He was horrified by how much plastic he saw in the water and began collecting and analyzing it and thinking of ways to clean it up. Once there was a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and now we are in the middle of the Plastic Age.

He laid out his vision to clean up the ocean at a TEDx talk when he was 18. It went viral and a self-styled savior of the seas was born. We can now actually clean up 50 percent of the patch in just five years time. A slick Silicon Valley-style roadshow followed, and Slatt raised more than $30 million for his ocean cleanup. Money he used to market his message and carry out research, including an aerial survey to map the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. For the past five years, a team of engineers and scientists had been feverishly modeling, testing, and revising Slat's idea. But can technology solve a complicated problem like this? I think it's pretty much the only thing that ever has.

Thanks to human ingenuity and the human ability to work together, we do have a good shot at solving it. Ingenuity? Well, maybe. But for many researchers, it was downright fanciful, given that 8 million tons of new plastic flows into the ocean every year, mostly from places that have no way of dealing with their trash. This is a fetid river in Manila. These are the shores of the Dominican Republic. But the problem is everywhere. This was Los Angeles last fall. Over time, that plastic disperses, disintegrates into smaller pieces,

and often gets eaten by fish, making its way up the food chain. Scientists still aren't sure what all that means for human health, but it's tightening its grip on marine animals and their habitat. On the most remote, most pristine beach, in the middle of the ocean on a little tiny island, you will find trash there too. Denise Hardesty is a research scientist for the Australian government and a leading authority on ocean plastics, who studies the problem around the world. I was even just in Antarctica a couple years ago,

and even there we're finding the refuse of human society. And what does that tell you? The ubiquity of plastics has really made its mark. You know, humans are really good at creating things, and we're really good at making things that last forever, clearly, with plastics and they are everywhere. Plastics take the stage at an international exhibit. And that's been the case ever since plastic filled our homes in the 1950s. The women folk washing dishes made of plastic, dishes that bounce when they drop to

the floor. It was revolutionary. When the rain comes down on tomorrow's brave new world, you'll put on your plastic raincoat, put up your plastic hood. Television commercials billed it as the material of the future. See these two portable radios? Well, watch this. Let her go, Betsy. I think the flood of plastic products in the years after World War II helped make the sort of American dream possible for people. Susan Frankel is a San Francisco-based science writer whose book, Plastic, A Toxic Love Story, chronicles its history. It's kind of a technological miracle.

I mean, we've created this family of materials and figured out how to make them do pretty much anything that we want them to do. You know, you want it to be bendy, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be squishy, you want it to keep lettuce fresh for two weeks. Listen to the sounds of freshness. There are a lot of things that are made of plastic that we don't really think of as plastic. Where is plastic in our lives? How long have you got? I mean, I did a thought experiment at the start of my book where I said, okay, I'm going to go a day without touching anything plastic. I thought it was a great idea until I walked into the bathroom and looked down at the plastic toilet seat and my plastic toothbrush.

And so I said, okay, I'm going to spend the day writing down everything that's plastic. And by the day's end, I had this, you know, enormous list. You look back at some of those old commercials and it's really, you know, plastic is sort of something that is life changing. Yes. I mean, one of the things you see in these early ads is it will last forever. Yes, yes, it will last forever. And unfortunately, nobody really thought about what that meant. There are really only three things you can do with plastic.

Put it in the landfill, burn it, or recycle it. For decades, we thought recycling was the best answer. And we were told to throw our plastic, our paper, and our aluminum cans into those familiar bins to be picked up and carted away. But according to Roland Geyer, an environmental scientist at the University of California, 90% of the plastic we used never made it into one of those bins at all. The other 10 percent ended up in places like Recology, a recycling facility in northern California. Here are lots of milk bottles.

And you'll be surprised to hear what they and many other plants across the country had been doing with that plastic. Until recently in California and probably much of the rest of the U.S., two-thirds of the plastic went straight to China. China. Why China? China was accepting it and it appears that China found a way to recycle it economically, which the U.S. has trouble with. But all that changed two years ago, when China decided it didn't want to be the world's trash dump and shut the door to our plastic. Leaving plants like Recology scrambling.

Where is all that recycling going now? A lot of the plastic has been diverted to other countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Thailand. And of those countries, do we know that what we're sending to them is ultimately being recycled? We hope it gets recycled. We hope, but do we think? We don't know. There's no real audit trail or anything like that. So it's very difficult. And we know that a lot of plastic in Southeast Asia and other countries ends up in open dumps. This is discouraging, I think, to most people. Is the idea of recycling a myth. I wouldn't call it a myth.

But it's not working. For plastic, it's currently not working. So we need to change it. We need to try different things. By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. There are campaigns across the country to ban straws and bags and try to reduce the amount of plastic we consume in the first place. But Susan Frankel says it's simply not enough. I know all the problems about plastic and if you open my kitchen you know cabinets I've got a box of ziplock

baggies there because it's easier. So you know we have to really wrestle ourselves with what conveniences are we willing to give up? What kind of consumption are we willing to sort of pull back on in order to change? Plastics. Plastics. Yeah, plastics everywhere. It is a big ask that would require a major overhaul in the way we live our lives. Boyan. Boyan here. Which may be why Boyan Slat and his big idea were getting breathless coverage from the world's media. We start with one system because we've proved the technology and learn as much as possible.

Nearly all of whom seemed to turn up for the spectacle last September as his system was towed under the Golden Gate Bridge, 1,400 miles out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Well, it's five years of work and planning coming together in one nice shot. It's overwhelming, exciting to see. It's going through the Golden Gate Bridge right now. It's a beautiful sight. But after deployment, its performance was less enchanting. First, the plastic it did manage to corral ended up floating right back into the Pacific. Then the apparatus broke

apart and had to be towed back to shore. And even if he did get the device working, scientists we spoke to had serious doubts about just how effective it could be. For one thing, its 10-foot screen could only skim the ocean's surface, missing plastic that's much deeper. It could also end up trapping marine animals. But their biggest criticism is that it's pointless to spend millions of dollars trying to clean the middle of the ocean when more and more plastic is flowing into it from the coastlines. For researcher Denise Hardesty, Slat's device was certainly no silver bullet. You're skeptical. I would love to be wrong.

What I'm suggesting is that we use our resources wisely and focus on the items close to source where we can clean them up. Get it earlier. Get it early. Get it closer to the shore. Get it close to shore. And if you really want to focus it, be smart. Have these big trash booms near the city centers because that's where we lose much more of it as well. And if you want to be even smarter, stop it before it gets to the coast.

You know, have some rubbish traps at rivers that feed out into the mouth of the ocean or further upstream even. You know, I think the analogy that you hear often is if you've got a flood in the bathtub, you're not going to go just get a bunch of towels and try to keep cleaning it up because it's still flooding over. You really need to turn off the tap, right? People that we spoke to said this is like trying to mop up a flooded bathroom but leaving the tap on. I think humanity can do more than one thing at the same time.

And, you know, if your bathroom is over flooding, I'm still pretty happy that the mop exists. Eventually, we need to mop it up, right? Slatt has spent months working to overcome those early failures, and an updated device is now back in the garbage patch. He says he's hopeful that this time it will work. Plastic is everywhere. It's not unusual to see water bottles or grocery bags wash up on our beaches. But surely if you traveled far enough away from people and cities, you might be able to find a pristine beach untouched by the plague of plastic, right? Well, we decided to find out.

Last summer, we traveled to Midway Atoll, a small group of islands midway between the U.S. and Asia. It's an American territory best known as the site of one of the most important battles of World War II. Today, the islands are closed to the public and home to a host of exotic animals, including a charismatic seabird called the Laysan albatross. It's not easy to get to Midway. Visiting involves a long permitting process and a chartered plane from Honolulu to the middle of the ocean. We're almost Midway to Midway right now from Oahu. After three hours, tiny slivers of light appear, a postage stamp in the vast Pacific.

As soon as we landed, it felt like we tumbled down the rabbit hole into a curious wonderland. There are so many birds on the atoll, we could only get here after dark, once they'd settled down for the night. As we made our way inland, the albatross chicks were oblivious to our caravan. But by daybreak, it seemed like we'd found paradise, a tiny atoll surrounded by turquoise waters. Spinner dolphins patrol the coastline. Endangered monk seals and giant sea turtles bask on its white beaches. And, of course, the birds. So many birds.

Over a million flapping, snapping, chattering. Laysan albatross, the largest colony anywhere in the world. They just don't get out of the way. Some are friendlier than others, just like people. Amanda Boyd works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees Midway. Every day, its beaches are the scene of small acts of courage and clumsy crash and burns. Once they're off, the albatross can spend months at sea venturing thousands of miles, but returning to the same spot and the same partner. A relationship that begins with more preening and chest pumping than

a Miami nightclub. Oh my gosh, to watch them dance and as they're courtshipping. When you find a pair that has actually been together and they're in sync, it's mesmerizing. They know each other's cues and it's like art. It's beautiful. It's inspiring to watch that. Inspiring and loud. Honking lovers who are mostly ignored by their neighbors. If any place should be unspoiled, it's Midway. The atoll is blissfully isolated, off limits to the public, and protected as part of one of the largest marine reserves in the world.

So it was disturbing to see this. What are those orange and yellow things? Harbor booms. When we met him, Kevin O'Brien oversaw marine debris removal in the region for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Hundreds of tons of plastic have been retrieved from Midway in the last two decades. He showed us last year's pile, a veritable department store of discarded debris. Here, an intact CRTV screen. A whole screen. Oh, look at this. So you've got enough things you can sort it, I guess.

Toothbrushes. We find an incredible amount of toothbrushes. Tires. Tires. These can be dangerous because the young monk seals often will get curious and stick their snout into these eel cones. Sometimes we'll find jugs full of chemicals with the lid still on, which we have to treat pretty carefully because we're never sure what's in it. You know, the label's gone. We've found car bumpers, motorcycle helmets, fireman's helmets, golf clubs, bowling balls. All this trash ends up here because Midway sits at the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast ocean whirlpool that draws in plastic from coastlines around the world. Kevin O'Brien had been coming to Midway for a decade to survey and retrieve the debris. This is some of what he hauled away last fall.

These nets are almost always made of some sort of plastic. Once they've been weathered in the environment, they can become very brittle and can easily break down into microplastics. So this looks like it's breaking apart and going away. Right. But it's not. But it's breaking apart and going away. Right. But it's not. But it's not.

Long before plastics invaded Midway, U.S. forces repelled a Japanese assault in the Second World War. The Japanese had hoped to use the islands as a bridge to the mainland. The American victory there in 1942 was a turning point. Today, there's a monument to the Americans who died in the Battle of Midway. And if you tour the islands, you find relics everywhere. Decaying artillery, derelict hangars, and beneath the water, the rusting skeletons of old warships, and of course, evidence of the new battle underway here.

We've been cleaning it up for years. And it keeps coming. And it keeps coming. On a walk along one of the beaches, we found a shoreline strewn with bottles and buoys, crates and canisters. Is this a problem that's unique to these islands? It's really not. There are beaches like this all over the world. What is unique about Midway is that none of this plastic you see on the beaches here originates here. It's a problem that doesn't know borders.

I think a lot of people see this on their beaches, and it kind of looks like sea glass at first. Yeah, it looks like a mosaic. It's really colorful, actually kind of beautiful. Yeah, but what is it really? But a lot of this is really plastics, you know, and we can sift it here and see what we come up with. Look at that. Little pieces.

Sure. This is a bottle cap you can see. And what's the harm with this? Are fish eating this? Yeah, the smaller the piece of plastic, then the smaller the animal that can consume it. Do we know that they definitely have effects on fish? We don't know that for certain. These plastics become a magnet, essentially, for toxic chemicals that are found in the environment. PCBs, pesticides, fire retardant chemicals. And so the longer a piece of plastic found in the environment, PCBs, pesticides, fire retardant chemicals. And so the longer a piece of plastic stays in the environment, the more toxic it becomes. Studies have found these microplastics in everything from supermarket seafood to drinking water.

But scientists don't yet know what all that means for our health. When an adult comes in, they'll make a couple of noises saying, hey, I'm back. But the effects on birds are easier to see. Kelly Goodale, a U.S. fish and wildlife biologist, took us on a ride around Midway to show us the impact all this plastic is having on them. So the adults have been coming back every few days

to a couple of weeks to feed them. What's happening right now? It's regurgitating up more food. Dinner time here might make you lose your appetite. Whoa! Did you see that squid? That was a whole squid. That ought to keep you happy for a while.

For all the fish and squid they catch, the albatross bring back plastic, too, from that great Pacific garbage patch. Goodale showed us their nesting grounds. So here we do have a chick that did die, and as you can see, if you want to take a look at it. Oh, my goodness. In here, you see there's so many pieces of plastic oh plastic bag and they eat the plastic bags why you know these can look like um food sources it could look like a squid to them yeah so they think this is food they do think it's food and you know flying fish they can lay eggs on floating debris and so they will absolutely lay eggs on pieces of

floating plastic. So if the adults are out there foraging, they pick up those eggs as well as pieces of plastic in there. So it's the serving dish for the egg? Yes. And of the birds that you end up looking at and dissecting, what percentage of them have plastics in them? Every single bird has plastic in it. Every bird? Yes. U.S. fish and wildlife scientists estimate the birds carry five tons of plastic back to Midway in their stomach every year. Some of it, Kelly Goodale collects and catalogs. A comb.

This one is probably one of the most disturbing ones. This was... Oh my goodness. You have bottle caps in here. This looks like trash from a drugstore. It pretty much is. Okay, all of this was inside one bird. Parts of this atoll can look like the site of a disaster.

And while Goodale says it's impossible to pinpoint the cause of death in every case, there's no question plastic can be fatal to these birds, either by filling up their stomachs and leaving little room for food, or by tearing up their insides. As these photos from Fish and Wildlife show, that plastic, which scientists say can take hundreds of years to decompose, is often the only thing left after the birds have gone. Everyone, no matter where you live, has a role in this problem. Even someone in South Dakota, for instance, who has a river near their home and doesn't dispose of their plastic bottle appropriately

might be contributing to this problem. All the way out here. All waterways lead to the ocean, and once this stuff gets into the ocean, the ocean currents can take it anywhere. Anywhere and everywhere. It's hard to find a place not plagued by plastic. Just then, we got a reminder of what else is at stake

as an endangered monk seal paddled by. What's this guy doing, you think? Is he coming in to eat? He's coming in, he's checking it out. These are the locals. And whether or not you care about all these incredible species that live up here in this very remote place, it doesn't necessarily matter

because there are so many other things that rely on the ocean. People rely on the ocean for their livelihood, fishermen. People rely on the ocean for recreation, tourism. And right here, we have an indicator of the health of our ocean. You say this is an indicator. What does it tell you? It tells us that the scale of the problem is massive and it's global. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. And tomorrow, be sure to watch CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News.