60 Minutes - Sunday, May 5, 2019

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

The FBI says anyone on the internet should expect to be attacked by cybercriminals. Scott Pelley hears from Steve Long -- who is the CEO of Hancock Regional Hospital -- and the victim of a massive data breach. Bill Whitaker reports on frontotemporal dementia -- which researchers say is "robbing us of our very essence; of our humanity." Jon Wertheim introduces us to Tanya Tagaq -- a Canadian throat singer -- with a twist. 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

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. More than a quarter of cities and counties across America say they have fended off an attack on their essential computer networks.

Hospitals, city halls, and transit hubs have all been crippled by sophisticated ransomware attacks. Cybercrime has really become a way of life and connected to everything we do and really every crime we see. At what point does this ransomware come to our phones? I think it's already on the doorstep for that. This is a story about the cruelest disease you've never heard of. It's called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. FTD is the number one form of dementia in Americans under the age of 60. I was washing my hands, and I looked in the the mirror and I did not recognize my own face. Didn't recognize yourself?

No, I looked in the mirror and I kept looking. I remember I kept looking at this woman wondering who was she. And now for something completely different. Tanya Tagak is a pop star who happens to be an Inuit throat singer. Modernizing an ancient art form born high above the Arctic Circle. Do you like it? Yeah. You waited too long there. Do you like it? Um, uh, yeah. You waited too long there.

Well, it's not Van Morrison, that's for sure. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Thank you. 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. This past week, Cleveland's airport began to recover from a computer attack that took down its flight information, baggage displays, and its email. The FBI says it was another ransomware attack on a sensitive government network. Ransomware locks up a victim's files until a ransom is paid. More and more critical public service networks are the targets. Before Cleveland, the city governments of Newark, Atlanta, and Sarasota were hit, and San Francisco's transit authority, the Colorado Department of Transportation, and the Port of San Diego. Today, 26 percent of cities and counties say they fend off an attack on their networks every hour. Perhaps even worse, dozens of hospitals

have been held hostage across the country. In January 2018, the night shift at Hancock Regional Hospital watched its computers crash with deepest apologies. The 100-bed facility in the suburbs of Indianapolis got its CEO, Steve Long, out of bed. We had never been through this before, and it's something that I read in the journals, and I say, oh, those poor folks, I'm glad that's never going to happen to us. But when you come in and you see that the files on your computer have been renamed, and all of the files were renamed, either we apologize for files or we're sorry. And there was a moment when I thought, well, maybe they're not so bad. They said they were sorry.

But in fact, they had encrypted every file that we had on our computers and on the network. Well, the ER, as we have said, still had... Long told 911 to divert emergency patients to a hospital 20 miles away. His staff turned to pen and paper. Nothing electronic could be trusted. This is a ransomware, so this is a virus that has gotten into the computer system. Would it have the ability to jump to a piece of clinical equipment? Could it jump to an IV pump? Could it jump to a ventilator? We needed a little time just to make sure about that. But time was a luxury not offered in the ransom demand. Your network has been encrypted. If you would like to purchase

the decryption keys, you have seven days to do so, or your network files will be permanently deleted. And then it gave us the amount that we would need to pay to get that back. And that came to? About $55,000. That was the same price demanded of the city of Leeds, Alabama, three weeks after Hancock Hospital. Mayor David Miller was surprised his town of 12,000 would be a target. Not much to notice in Leeds, at least not since Charles Barkley graduated from the high school. I didn't know that this malware attack was actually a ransomware attack. As soon as we found that out, that took it to a little different level. How do you mean? Well, it was going to cost us some money. Like the hospital, the city of Leeds was cast back into the age of paper. No email, no access to its personnel files or financial systems. Can all companies and local governments expect to

be attacked? I think everyone should expect to be attacked. The FBI's Mike Chrisman says cyber crooks know governments and hospitals are likely to pay because they can't afford not to. Until his recent promotion, Chrisman was in charge of the FBI's cyber crime unit. You're waiting for the day that somebody says we have the 911 system held hostage in a major city and we need $10 million today. I hope that day never comes, but I think we should prepare for that possibility. Chrisman says in 2017, 1,700 successful ransomware attacks were reported, but he figures that's less than half. Most businesses, he says, would rather pay than admit they were hacked. I'm aware of one ransomware variant that affected all 50 states

that had some $30 million in losses and over $6 million in ransom payments. I would tell you that the losses are very significant and easily approach $100 million or more just in the United States. That ransomware variant he's talking about is the one that held Hancock Hospital hostage. It's called SAMSAM after one of its file names. Experts told Steve Long SAMSAM is unbreakable. There was nothing that we could do to unlock those files. Our only choice was to wipe the system and hope that we had backups or to purchase the decryption keys.

To pay the ransom. Indeed, that is exactly what that means. But Sam Sam had infected the hospital's backup files. The FBI advised Long not to pay, but after two days, after his staff filled out 10,000 pieces of paper, he paid the ransom. The crooks demanded digital money known as Bitcoin.

Ransomware is possible only because Bitcoin is so difficult to trace. Mayor Miller held out two weeks before he paid his Bitcoin ransom after a little bargaining. I just had to grit my teeth and realize that this was a business decision and that was the way to do it. So they asked for 60 and you paid eight. How did you get there? Well, I got a degree in finance. Actually, our city inspector and our city clerk let them know that, hey, you're dealing with a very small town here. That's a lot of money to us, and we think we can scrape together $8,000. The thieves were honorable.

In Leeds, at Hancock Hospital, and in many cases, the ransom buys decryption keys that actually work. The crooks need credibility to keep the ransoms flowing. Did you ever find out? Never. Who they were or where they were? No. Wouldn't you just love to know? Wouldn't I love to know. Leeds may have been hit by one of the many ransomware variations that simply scan the internet blindly looking for vulnerable networks wherever they may be. How many targets do they attack at a time?

You could conservatively say in the thousands, the tens of thousands. Tom Pace is vice president of BlackBerry Silence, a leading security firm. So this isn't a crook sitting in front of a desktop, breaking a sweat, trying to break into somebody's system. This is something they unleash that's automated, and they sit back and drink coffee until they get the results. That certainly appears to be the rule, not the exception. Making the coffee may be the hard part.

Pace showed us a website that offers ransomware for rent. An attacker can use one of many illicit products here, and the website takes a cut if ransom is paid. And something else that's interesting here is they actually provide you with basically a chat room where you can ask questions to the people who maintain this architecture for you. Frequently asked questions for criminals. Exactly. Tom Pace logged onto the site and used it to encrypt a network of his own.

So all of the files that are on this system have now been successfully encrypted. So this took you just slightly over five minutes and you didn't write a single line of code. Correct. Off the shelf. Off the shelf. ready to go organization pace told us ransoms are typically modest like it hancock hospital or leeds alabama 50 000 or so if you're asking for millions from everybody that's just everybody doesn't have millions to pay right so finding that sweet spot and sticking to it has worked well and that's why the same ransom was asked of little Leeds, Alabama and great big Atlanta. Correct.

The city of Atlanta has experienced a ransomware cyber attack. Three weeks after Leeds, Sam Sam slipped into Atlanta's City Hall. Howard Shook is a councilman and chair of the finance committee. 9-1-1 was up and running, but for a while the police did not have the ability to do computer checks on license plates and you know cars they were pulling up on and that kind of thing which was a concern. What else crashed? The court system went down which was a major inconvenience for the thousands of people cycling through municipal court. SamSam demanded $50,000, but Atlanta refused to pay.

Instead, the city spent $20 million to recover on its own. It took months, and seven years of police dash cam video was never recovered. Why did you think paying was a bad idea? At first, it was just instinctive. I mean, if you're being violated, I don't know why you should reward somebody for having done that. It must gall the hell out of some of your clients to pay the bad guys. Absolutely.

I mean, we have lots of clients who are incredibly angry. I mean, you have to imagine, this is, for many of them, the worst day of their professional career, and sometimes their life. A day made even worse by the occasional high-end ransom. Pace told us one of his clients paid almost a million dollars. Another paid up after receiving this threat. Would it not be a shame if we leaked all of your internal data about your clients and customers? Sounds to us like a large lawsuit waiting to happen. So they're extorting them in two ways. They're extorting them by actually encrypting all of the files, and then they're extorting them by threatening to also

release the data. Once this transaction is completed and the client gets his files back, how does he know he's not going to be attacked again? There's no way to really prove that he will not be. We try and do a really good job of making sure we reduce all the vulnerabilities and entry points. But there is no guarantee that they won't come back to the same organization that they just successfully impacted. Though we haven't seen that happen very often, though it has happened. Last year, the Justice Department said it unmasked Sam Sam. A grand jury indicted two Iranians, neither named Sam. The FBI says the two Iranian suspects were in it for the money, not espionage. They collected six million dollars before they went quiet after

the indictment. Prosecutors say the suspects are in Iran where they can't be extradited. The most threatening ransomware tends to come from countries, including Russia, that the FBI can't reach. Is cybercrime becoming to the FBI what banks were in the 1930s? I think it is. Cybercrime has really become a way of life and connected to everything we do and really every crime we see. And I know that by 2020, we expect to see 50 billion devices worldwide connected to the Internet. So the question becomes, at what point does this ransomware come to our phones where some crook says, I've got your phone, send me 50 bucks? I think it's already on the doorstep for that. I think some of those devices that connect to the Internet can not only be compromised,

but they can be used to facilitate other attacks under the command and control of bad actors. This can be, I have your phone, I have your car, I have your house, anything that's connected to the internet. Absolutely. This is a story about the cruelest disease you have never heard of. It's called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. And given the devastating toll it takes on its victims and their families, it ought to be much better known than it is. FTD is the number one form of dementia in Americans under the age of 60. What causes it is unclear, but it attacks the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain

which control personality and speech, and it's always fatal. It is not Alzheimer's disease which degrades the part of the brain responsible for memory. With FTD, people either display such bizarre behavior that their loved ones can hardly recognize them, or they lose the ability to recognize themselves. That's what happened to Tracy Lind one day a few years ago as she was standing in a public restroom. I was washing my hands, and I looked in the mirror,

and I did not recognize my own face. Didn't recognize yourself? No, I looked in the mirror, and I kept looking. I remember I kept looking at this woman wondering who was she. This is who she was, the very Reverend Tracy Lind, Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the city's most prominent preachers and civic leaders. She was 61 years old when both she and her spouse, Emily Ingalls, began to notice trouble with things Tracy had always done very well, like finding the right word, recognizing congregants and friends' faces, and of course, her own. That's when I said,

oh man, I got to go see a doctor. When that happened, were you scared? Oh, I was scared to death. Emily, what did you think was happening? I thought there's something not right with her brain. On Election Day 2016, Tracy Lind got the diagnosis, frontotemporal dementia. She has what's called the speech variant of the disease, which, among other things, attacks the part of the brain where language lives. Sometimes you're just, you're fine, and you're on.

And then there are other times that the words just don't come out. I mean, even if I know what the word is, sometimes I feel like I'm playing bingo. And when I find the word, I shout it. I feel like I'm playing bingo. And when I find the word, it's like I shout it. I feel like an imbecile, you know. Apple. Oh, yeah. Apple. That's it. And I get all excited. This is acutely painful for Tracy because being a powerful, effective speaker has always been at the core of her identity. One of the first things you did once you got this diagnosis was to resign from your job as dean at Trinity Cathedral. Why did you take that action so quickly? Mainly it was I knew I was starting to fail even though I was faking it pretty well.

Since stepping down, Tracy and Emily have traveled around the country and the world speaking and preaching about her FTD, or as Tracy puts it, telling the story of dementia from the inside out. I was determined to live what I had been preaching for over 30 years, and out of pain comes joy. I'm going to face this disease called FTD that I'd never heard of before, and I'm going to see what I can do with it. I don't know if you are aware of how unique this situation is, that you are in the middle of this decline from dementia, and yet you're so able to articulate what that's like. I am aware of that. I think my curiosity is what's getting me through it. Because otherwise, Phil, I'm just going to lay down and roll up in a ball.

Tracy says she has good days and bad days. Just in our interview, there were moments when she was completely in control and moments when she wasn't. And I'm doing some, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I know there's no... Do you want help? Can you help, please? Okay. This is the way this very sad illness presents.

Dr. Bruce Miller may be the world's leading expert on frontotemporal dementia. He runs a lab at the University of California, San Francisco that's doing cutting-edge research on the two main forms of FTD, the speech variant that Tracy Lind has and a behavioral variant that attacks personality, judgment, and empathy. Pleasure to see you both again. On the day we visited Dr. Miller's clinic, he and his team met with FTD patient Thomas Cox

and his wife, Laurie. At first glance, Thomas seems fine, but he's not. I've got an FTD. Okay. And has it affected you so far? No. In fact, Laurie Cox says that starting a few years ago, Thomas lost interest in her, in their son, and in his work, so much that he was fired from his job. By now, he's pretty much reduced to looking at photos on his phone. That's Bugatti. That's our dog. Your dog. I can blame the disease. I can say that the disease stole my husband. When a family sees someone with this illness, they don't recognize them.

This is not the person I married that I love. This is not my father or my mother. You have said that FTD attacks people at the very soul of their humanity. This is profound as anything that can happen to a human being. It robs us of our very essence, of our humanity, of who we are. Bruce Miller says because so many cases are first misdiagnosed as mental illness, it takes an average of three years and several expensive brain scans to get a correct diagnosis of FTD. So whether it's 20,000 new cases every year, 100,000, 200,000, we still don't know.

But in young people with neurodegeneration, frontotemporal dementia is a big one. So if you see someone who is suffering dementia at a younger age, very strong likelihood that it's FTD. Dr. Miller showed us this composite image of two of the major degenerative brain diseases. Frontotemporal dementia shown in blue, Alzheimer's disease shown in red. So very different geography, very different clinical manifestations. What does the blue indicate? The blue indicates that there's loss of tissue. When we see loss of tissue in that brain region,

we know people have lost their interest in life, their drive. They do less. They care less about other people. That loss of empathy, Miller says, can produce dangerous, impulsive, even criminal behavior. And those with behavioral FTD are rarely aware that anything has changed. He went from being a caring, doting father and husband, and it just seemed like he flipped the switch off. And he had no idea that he'd changed. He had no idea. Amy Johnson and her husband Mark married in 2006, settled in the small Minnesota town of Wyndham,

and now have four young children, three boys and a girl. Three years ago, Amy says, Mark suddenly seemed to stop caring about her and the kids. That's the first time that I really remember thinking to myself, what happened? Where did you go? Amy recalls a day when she left Mark in charge of their sons, then three and two, only to come home and find the boys playing outside alone by a busy street while Mark sat watching TV, oblivious. On other days, he began to display compulsive behavior she had never seen before. He couldn't stop eating. I started locking the food up. He would walk down to the grocery store and buy more. I took his credit card. He'd walk down to the grocery store and steal food. I mean, these changes that you

saw, did you ask him what's going on? Yeah. And he just said, oh, I don't think anything's different, is it? It was. Mark began making inappropriate remarks to a female co-worker at the company where he worked as a manufacturing engineer. He was fired. And his reaction was, oh, well, I guess, okay. So what's for supper tonight? What was your reaction? I was just devastated. I was seven months pregnant at the time with our daughter. With your fourth child?

With my fourth child. So as this progresses, what's the eventual outcome? Outcome of this is always death. Always death. Always death. We have no way of intervening yet to slow the progression. As FTD corrodes the brain, it also eventually causes bodily functions to shut down. That's what leads to death.

But Bruce Miller is optimistic, pointing to promising research both in his lab and funded by NIH grants to scientists around the country. Bruce Miller, National Institute of Health and Human Services, Suddenly we have interventions and research that are going on that give me great hope. Dr. When might you expect a breakthrough? Bruce Miller, National Institute of Health and Human Services, I'm hoping in the next five years that we will have very powerful therapies in certain variants of frontotemporal dementia that may stop it cold. Tracy Lind and Emily Ingalls have no idea whether any breakthrough will come in time to help them. If not, Tracy will

eventually lose the ability to speak at all, and then the ability to swallow. The not being able to swallow part, that's what's really frightening. So I try to live in the present moment. I'm not very good at living in the moment, so I worry a lot about the future. Do you worry about taking care of me? Yeah, I worry about taking care of you. Sure. What's going to be the hardest part? I think the hardest part is going to be the loss of the relationship. Has Emily told you this before? No, I don't think so.

As you can see, caregivers suffer as much as patients. For months, Amy Johnson kept Mark at home, even as she mothered four small children and held a full-time job. But his symptoms got worse and worse. When did it become clear to you that you had to put him in a facility? I went to an appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and she said, I think it's time for you to look for a different place. Because now when he thinks of something,

the part of his brain that tells him that's a bad idea doesn't work anymore. Mark Johnson now lives in a facility about an hour away from home. He's gained nearly 100 pounds due to compulsive eating, even walking into elderly residents' rooms and taking their food. Amy says his care now costs her nearly $7,000 a month. Out of pocket? Out of pocket. He would be devastated to know that that's where his retirement savings are going

and that they're not going to his family. Crippling costs are common for FTD families, and it's often tough to find a facility to care for patients like Mark Johnson. The assisted living industry is not set up for 6'3", 40-year-olds. How's it going? This is Bill. How are you? Very nice to meet you. Amy visits Mark as often as she can and invited us to come along one afternoon he told us he'd just like to go home do you think you need help no

so do you understand you understand why you're here? No. No? Think you'd be okay at home? Yeah. I think Amy thinks, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I think she thinks this is the best place for you right now. Okay. After another minute, Mark said, all right, see ya, and we left him. Big hug.

Okay. It's clearly painful for Amy to see what FTD has done to her husband and to know what it will do they gave him two to five years to live in two to five years two to five years so how are you doing now it depends on the day i miss him a lot. Chances are you won't be hearing Tanya Tagak's music at your next dinner party or wafting over the speakers at the mall. She's technically a pop star, but not in the same vein as, say, her fellow Canadians Drake or Arcade Fire, both of whom Tagak recently beat out to win the country's most prestigious music prize. Hailing from Nunavut, a territory above the Arctic Circle, Tagak is an Inuit throat singer, keeper of an ancient art form that stretches the limits of the human larynx.

She has brought this traditional sound screeching onto the modern scene by layering it with elements of punk rock, heavy metal, and electronica. Rolling Stone called her music transfixing. We'd never heard anything quite like it before. And so it is we say, tell, oh, tell. Tanya Tagak begins every performance by closing her eyes. As she puts it, shutting out the visual and plugging into the sound. Her voice flickers. Then builds to a rhythmic panting. Then comes the inevitable moment,

when the mounting tension uncoils and she unleashes a sonic storm. If this is not what you were expecting in what throat singing to look or sound like, stick with us here. Her music is improvised. There is no set plan, no set set list often there are no shoes at 5-1 to got generates a mighty sound especially for a diminutive person and she'll be the first to tell you it's not easy listening you give people a warning sometimes yeah Yeah, because I feel like it should be consensual. You shouldn't have to sit there and suffer through it if you don't like it,

because it's not for everybody. You tell people if you don't like it, hey. I'll point out the exits, like on the airplane. You're like a flight attendant. There are four exits. And then I tell them it's okay to leave. Like, yeah, I'm not going to be insulted. Those who stay in their seats are bathed in a mashup of Inuit tradition and contemporary experiment. And as Tagak told us over lunch before a concert in New York, no two shows are alike. A good show means what to you? When it's effortless in the fact that I feel like I'm a fish on the end of a hook. I'm just being reeled in. What's really in it? The music. I get

like, you know, kind of hypnotized by it, and it just becomes its own creature. To make sense of all this sound, to understand Tanya Tagak and her music, you have to go to the source. So we headed north. Four flights and 2,300 miles from New York, we landed on a gravel runway in Nunavut, Canada's northernmost and largest territory, ancestral home of the Inuit, indigenous people of the north. Nunavut, literally our land in the native Inuktitut language, is made up of 800,000 square miles of Canadian Arctic, roughly three times the size of Texas. The landscape calls to mind the setting for an extraterrestrial sci-fi movie. And then there is the lighting. It might not look like it, but it's now midnight here inside the perimeter of the Arctic Circle.

In summer, months go by without a sunset. Of course, that means that in winter, months can elapse in total darkness. By then, it's often so cold that Fahrenheit and Celsius converge at minus 40 degrees. Which is why we visited in July. Tukak's touring schedule keeps her based in Toronto, but every summer she comes back to the family cabin in her hometown of Cambridge Bay, population 1,700. Tagak and her older brother Carson took us out on the tundra,

more of a lunar scene than a polar one, though we did manage to find a patch of ice. We rode for hours along the shores of the Arctic Ocean to a favorite fishing spot. Come on! It never gets old. You're free. You're living with the land, you're living with the animals. The land, the sea, the animals,

they all take turns playing Tagak's muse. And in summer, the rhythm of her life here is set by runs of Arctic char. My heart's beating fast. I want to eat one. Darn, where'd they go? Come on. I can't believe we don't have a fish. Because once you have fresh Arctic char, you're addicted. Back at the family cabin, Tagak's father and her daughter had more success with nets. Oh, wow. You got dinner. Yeah. Are you going to try or you don't have to? I'll

do it. Cheers. That's fresh fish. Nunavut is home to 40,000 Inuit or Inuk people. They have lived off the land and sea here since migrating east from across the Bering Strait a thousand years ago. Inuit throat singing, that sound we came all this way to hear, can be traced back just as far. Tanya and her friend Donna Lyle demonstrated the traditional form for us. Conceived in an igloo while the men were out hunting, it's really a friendly competition between two women, akin to a musical staring contest. There's a leader and a follower, and we have to be able to mimic the sound a split second after the first person does it. Both partners make short inhalations and exhalations

that vibrate over the top of their windpipes. You're basically trying to mess up the other person. I lost. I lost that round. Isn't this awesome? All the more awesome when you consider that throat singing was all but banned here in recent decades, along with many Inuit traditions in the native language. It was part of the colonial process. Children were forbidden from speaking their language or exercising their culture in any way whatsoever. And they told us our belief system was wrong. Canada has a long history of mistreating indigenous people. In one of the worst chapters, from the mid-19th century until the mid-90s,

the government separated thousands of Inuit children from their parents and placed them in church-run schools as a way to assimilate them. Tanya herself went to a residential school 500 miles from home 25 years ago. What was that experience like? It was a bit like jail where every single one of our minutes were accounted for, so we were very tightly controlled. It was like a boarding school by the time I went, but previous generations had it much, much harder. Most of them were sexually abused, beaten. This is really a shameful stain in Canadian history, isn't it? It's absolutely horrific. This anger, this despair, this't, don't, don't get inside!

This anger, this despair, this is what I'm hearing in some of your songs. Absolutely. I live with a broken heart, thinking about our history. And for this, we are sorry. The Canadian government apologized ten years ago for its policy of forced assimilation. But the country is still reckoning with generational trauma. Tagak's concerts serve as acts of resistance against the Canadian government and also celebrations of Inuit culture.

And the music has found global appeal. She's on perpetual tour of the world's concert halls. Her albums earn the kind of critical acclaim that would make most mainstream pop acts, well, scream. But Tagak told us she discovered throat singing quite by accident. Because the music was taboo for so long, her introduction came when she was away at college and feeling homesick. Tagak's mother, born and raised in an igloo, found some tape recordings of the traditional sound and mailed them to her. What are you hearing on these tapes that resonated with you? I could hear the land. It was incredible for me to be able to taste my home again in my ears. Well, you didn't just taste it in your ears. You tried to practice yourself.

For years, I was just throat singing in the shower. I was trying to do both of the voices. The call and the response. Mm-hmm. Then one night, she found herself casually throat singing for a few friends around a campfire at an arts festival in Nunavut. The festival director heard her and asked if she'd perform on stage. So I put on my slinky dress and a headband.

Like, I got up on stage and I was like, I'm me. It just was, it made total sense. I was like, okay, this is my thing. Her particular thing, combining throat singing with rock, punk, and pop, found a niche audience. And if the music resists classification and labels, so does Tagak herself. We asked about one label she rejects outright. Your Twitter bio says, don't call me Eskimo. What do you mean by that?

I have heard too many times as an insult to me personally. I've had that used against me. Like a raw meat eater, they meant it like you can't even cook your food, you're too savage. When you talk to Southerners, which is basically everyone, what are the stereotypes you encounter? There's a kind of a tokenization of our culture, like cute little happy Eskimos up there in the cold in their igloos, and not looking at the hard and cold facts that there's a lot of poverty and people are going through a lot of grief. Communities in Nunavut face far higher poverty levels than the rest of Canada,

and one main cause is food insecurity. Because so little grows on the northern tundra, food is imported and wildly expensive. We paid $15 for a jar of peanut butter here. It's a caribou head, yeah. Wow. Cool, eh? Hunting and fishing, caribou, musk ox, seal, and char, are not just an Inuit tradition, but means of survival, something Tagak says she constantly has to defend. We'll have people from California telling us not to fish or eat meat. It's like, what are you going to do? Here, show me. Where's the tofu?

Show me. Show me the f***ing tofu. It says your Whole Foods right behind us. Yeah, our Whole Foods is right here. She is especially protective of the seal hunt, using her spotlight to promote one of the Inuit's only renewable resources. Wearing seal and eating it, it's delicious. Tagak has taken on animal rights groups who portray seal hunting as inhumane. She once tweeted this photo of her baby daughter next to a harvested seal,

her way of normalizing the hunt. The post elicited angry responses, laying bare some of the ugliest assumptions about life in Nunavut. Like people think we club seals on the head. Just to be clear. I don't know anyone who's ever clubbed a seal. You don't like outsiders saying what you can and can't eat and what you can and can't harvest. I hate it. And you know what else makes me really mad? I'm telling you everything that pisses me off. She keeps a sense of humor as she sounds off both in conversation and in performance. Back up north, her brother Carson has never seen her play live, but says he's proud of her.

She's taking something old and making it new. Do you like it? Yeah. You waited too long there. Well, it's not Van Morrison, that's for sure. But I think it takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there the way that she has. And to take Nunavut and the North to the global stage is a good thing. Other throat singing acts are following her, breathing new life into an old art form. And for Tanya, this might be the most gratifying

note in her unlikely success. Oh, it makes me so happy. I'm like, be free! Say this about Tanya Tagak, go to the North Pole and back, and you won't come across an artist any freer. Thank you! Thank you so much. In the mail this week, comments on this past Sunday's story on the border. Sharon Alfonsi reported from McAllen, Texas, on what we saw with the U.S. Border Patrol, among Central American immigrant families seeking asylum,

and with the new Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan. Not surprisingly, the story prompted conflicting opinions from viewers. As a Texan, it was high time that the border problem was reported accurately and fairly. One can only wonder if the president's re-election campaign paid CBS for creating its campaign ad, which is what your horribly one-sided report on asylum constituted. And there was this from an Iowa viewer. Not a one-sided left versus right opinion, but facts. I felt compassion for the immigrants coming to the U.S., but also felt the need for improving our current system.

The day after our report aired, President Trump ordered new conditions for migrants applying for asylum. They include charging application fees, setting new rules withholding work permits while asylum cases are in the judicial system, and finding a solution to clear the years-long backlog in jammed immigration courts. The government has also announced a pilot program

to match the DNA of asylum seekers with the DNA of the children traveling with them at the border. It may begin as early as this week. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.