60 Minutes - Sunday, September 4, 2016

Episode Date: September 5, 2016

Professional hackers show Sharyn Alfonsi how easy it is to hack someone's cell phone. 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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So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. You've probably been warned to be careful about what you say and do on your phone. Do I need to connect? Yeah. Okay. But after you see what we found, you won't need to be warned again. So are you connected? I am. And I have your email. And more importantly, I have all the credit cards associated with that account.

The President of the United States called me on my cell phone. So if the hackers were listening in, they would know that phone conversation, and that's immensely troubling. Is everything hackable? Yes. We live in a world where we can't trust the technology that we use. My failure to say something can only be described as cowardice. I was a coward. That's former prosecutor Marty Stroud apologizing for sending an innocent man to death row for 30 years. In 2014, Glenn Ford was finally exonerated and released by the district attorney, who still defends the system.

Have you no compassion for what Mr. Ford has been through? Well, you don't know me at all, do you? But you have no problem asking that question. No, I'm asking because I'm seeking an answer. I'm not in the compassion business. Security is tight at the Large Hadron Collider. You need an iris scan to get inside. Thank you. You have been identified. Power, cooling. The entire complex is buried deep underground. This is the detector right here. It's believed to be the largest and most complex machine mankind has ever created.

The things it's searching for sound like they're straight out of science fiction. Oh, no, really? I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Scott Pelley.

Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. A lot of modern life is interconnected through the Internet of Things, a global empire of billions of devices and machines, auto navigation systems, smart TVs, thermostats and home security systems, telephone networks and online banking. Almost everything you can imagine is linked to the World Wide Web. And the emperor of it all is the smartphone. As we first told you last April, you've probably been warned to be careful about what you say and do on your phone. But after you see what we found, you won't need to be warned again.

We heard we could find some of the world's best hackers in Germany. So we headed for Berlin. Just off a trendy street and through this alley, we rang the bell at the door of a former factory. Hi. Hi, I'm Karsten. That's where we met Karsten Noll. Yeah, come on in.

A German hacker with a doctorate in computer engineering from the University of Virginia. We were invited for a rare look at the inner workings of security research labs. During the day, the lab advises Fortune 500 companies on computer security. That is not your local address in the VPN. But at night, this international team of hackers looks for flaws in the devices we use every day. Smartphones, USB sticks and SIM cards. They're trying to find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. So they can warn the public about risks.

At computer terminals and workbenches equipped with micro lasers, they physically and digitally break into systems and devices. Now, Noel's team is probing the security of mobile phone networks. Is one phone more secure than another? Is an iPhone more secure than an Android? All phones are the same. If you just have somebody's phone number, what could you do? Track their whereabouts, know where they go for work, which other people they meet.

You can spy on whom they call and what they say over the phone, and you can read their text. We wanted to see whether Knoll's group could actually do what they claimed. So we sent an off-the-shelf iPhone from 60 Minutes in New York to Representative Ted Lieu, a congressman from California. He has a computer science degree from Stanford and is a member of the House Committee that oversees information technology. He agreed to use our phone to talk to his staff knowing they would be hacked and they were. All we gave Noel was the number of the 60 Minutes iPhone that we lent the congressman.

Hello congressman, it's Sharon Alfonsi from 60 Minutes. As soon as I called Congressman Liu on his phone. Good, how are you doing? Noel and his team were listening and recording both ends of our conversation. I'm calling from Berlin and I wonder if I may talk to you about this. They were able to do it by exploiting a security flaw they discovered in signaling system 7 or SS7. It is a little known but vital global network that connects phone carriers. Congressman, thank you so much for helping us. Every person with a cell phone needs SS7 to call or text each other, though most of us have never heard of it.

Knoll says attacks on cell phones are growing as the number of mobile devices explodes. But SS7 is not the way most hackers break into your phone. Those hacks are on display in Las Vegas. Three days of nonstop hacking. That's where John Herring guided us through the unconventional convention where 20,000 hackers get together every year to share secrets and test their skills. You know, it's proving what's possible. Any system can be broken. It's just about knowing how to break it. Herring is a hacker himself. He's the 30-something whiz who co-founded the mobile security company Lookout when he was 23. Lookout has developed a

free app that scans your mobile phone for malware and alerts the user to an attack. How likely is it that somebody's phone has been hacked? In today's world, there's really only two types of companies or two types of people, which are those who have been hacked and realize it and those who have been hacked and haven't. How much do you think people have been kind of ignoring the security of their cell phones, thinking, I have got a passcode, I must be fine? I think that most people have not really thought about their phones as computers, and that's really starting to shift.

And that's what you think of it. It's like having a laptop now. Oh, absolutely. I mean, your mobile phone is effectively a supercomputer in your pocket. There's more technology in your mobile phone than was in the spacecraft that took man to the moon. I mean, it's really unbelievable. Is everything hackable? Yes. Everything? Yes. If somebody tells you you can't do it? I don't believe it. John Herring offered to prove it. So he gathered a group of ace hackers at our Las Vegas hotel, each of them a specialist in cracking mobile devices and figuring out how to protect them. Would you put your money in a bank that didn't test the locks on their safes? You know, we need to try and break it to make sure that the bad guys can't. How easy is it to break the phone right now? Very easy. As you've seen,

pretty trivial. So do I need to connect to it? Yeah. Okay. It started when we logged on to the hotel Wi-Fi. At least it looked like the hotel Wi-Fi. Herring had created a ghost version. It's called spoofing. I mean, this looks legitimate.

It looks very legitimate. So are you connected? I am. And I have your email. You have access to my email right now? Yeah, it's coming through right now. I actually can, I now have a ride sharing application up here. All the information that's being transmitted, including your account ID, your mobile phone,

which I just got the mobile number. Then more importantly, I have all the credit cards associated with that account. John Oberheide pointed out the greatest weakness in mobile security is human nature. With social engineering, you can't really fix the human element. Humans are gullible. They install malicious applications. They give up their passwords every day, and it's really hard to fix that human element. John Herring warned us he could spy on anyone through their own phone as long as the phone's camera had a clear view. We propped up the phone on my desk and set up cameras to record a demonstration.

First, he sent a text message with an attachment to download. You're in business. Then Herring called from San Francisco and proved the hack worked. You installed some malware in your device that's broadcasting your video from your phone. My phone's not even lit up. I understand, yeah. Weird. That's so creepy. It's pitch black for us. In this case, when I downloaded the attachment, Herring was able to take control of my phone. But Congressman Liu didn't have to do anything to get attacked. All Carson Null's team in Berlin needed to get into the congressman's phone was the number.

Remember SS7, that little-known global phone network we told you about earlier, there's a flaw in it that allowed Knoll to intercept and record the congressman's calls and track his movements in Washington and back home. The congressman has been in California, more specifically the LA area. Let's zoom in here a little bit. Torrance. The SS7 network is the heart of the worldwide mobile phone system. Phone companies use SS7 to exchange billing information. Billions of calls and text messages travel through its arteries daily. It is also the network that allows phones to roam. Are you able to track his movements even if he moves the location services and turns that off? Yes. The mobile network, independent from the little GPS chip in your phone, knows where you are.

So any choices that a congressman could have made, choosing a phone, choosing a PIN number, installing or not installing certain apps, have no influence over what we are showing because this is targeting the mobile network that, of course, is not controlled by any one customer. Despite him making good choices, you're still able to get to his phone. Exactly. Carson Knoll and his team were legally granted access to SS7 by several international cell phone carriers. In exchange, the carriers wanted Knoll to test the network's vulnerability to attack. That's because criminals have proven they can get into SS7. Mobile networks are the only place in which this problem can be solved. There is no global policing of SS7. Each mobile network has to move to protect their customers on their networks, and that is hard. Knoll and others told us some U.S. carriers are easier to access through SS7 than others.

60 Minutes contacted the Cellular Phone Trade Association to ask about attacks on the SS7 network. They acknowledged there have been reports of security breaches abroad, but assured us that all U.S. cell phone networks were secure. Congressman Lew was on a U.S. network using the phone we lent him when he was part of our hacking demonstration from Berlin. I just want to play for you something we were able to capture off your phone. Hey, Ted, it's Mark. How are you? I'm good. I sent you some revisions on the letter to the NSA regarding the data collection, you know, keeping it...

Wow. What is your reaction to knowing that they were listening to all of your calls? I have two. First, it's really creepy. And second, it makes me angry. Makes you angry. Why? They could hear any call of pretty much anyone that has a smartphone. It could be stock trades. You want someone to execute. It could be calls with a bank. Karsten Knoll's team automatically logged the numbers of every phone that called Congressman Liu,

which means there's a lot more damage that could be done than just intercepting that one phone call. A malicious hacker would be able to target and attack every one of the other phones, too. So give us an idea, without being too specific, of the types of people that would be in a congressman's phone. There are other members of Congress, other elected officials. Last year, the president of the United States called me on my cell phone, and we discussed some issues. So if the hackers were listening in, they would know that phone conversation, and that's immensely troubling. Knoll told us the SS7 flaw is a significant risk, mostly to political leaders and business executives, whose private communications could

be of high value to hackers. The ability to intercept cell phone calls through the SS7 network is an open secret among the world's intelligence agencies, including ours, and they don't necessarily want that hole plugged. If you end up hearing from the intelligence agencies that this flaw is extremely valuable to them and to the information that they're able to get from it, what would you say to that? That the people who knew about this flaw and saying that should be fired. Should be fired. Absolutely. Why? You cannot have 300 some million Americans and really, right, the global citizenry be at risk of having their phone conversations intercepted with a known flaw simply because some intelligence agencies might get some data.

That is not acceptable. I'd say that the average person is not going to be exposed to the types of attacks we showed you today. Our goal was to show you what's possible so people can really understand, if we don't address security issues, what the state of the world will be. Which will be what? We live in a world where we can't trust the technology that we use. Since our report first aired in April, security researchers in Germany said they've watched SS7 access for sale by criminals grow dramatically. And a week ago, the mobile security experts at Lookout revealed a flaw in iPhone software

that allowed hackers to take over the devices with just one wrong click. Apple quickly issued a worldwide fix. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. There may be no greater miscarriage of justice than to wrongfully convict a person of murder and sentence him to death.

But as we first reported in October, that's exactly what happened to Glenn Ford. He spent nearly 30 years on death row in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison until new evidence revealed he did not commit the murder. Ford was one of 150 inmates freed from death row since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. In all those exonerations, you have likely never heard a prosecutor admit his role and apologize for his mistakes in sending an innocent man to death row. But tonight, a prosecutor's confession. Marty Stroud speaks of an injustice he calls so great

it destroyed two lives, Glenn Ford's and his own. I ended up, without anybody else's help, putting a man on death row who didn't belong there. I mean, at the end of the day, beginning, end, middle, whatever you want to call it, I did something that was very, very bad. It was 1983, Shreveport, Louisiana, and 32-year-old prosecutor Marty Stroud was assigned his first death penalty case. A local jeweler, Isidore Roseman, had been robbed and murdered. Quickly, Stroud zeroed in on Glenn Ford.

Ford had done yard work for Roseman and was known to be a petty thief, and he admitted he had pawned some of the stolen jewelry. All that was enough to make him the primary suspect. Stroud knew a conviction would boost his career. I was arrogant, narcissistic, caught up in the culture of winning. Win regardless of the facts, the truth. Looking back on it, yes. It was a question about other people's involvement. I should have followed up on that. I didn't do that.

Why didn't you? I think my failure to say something can only be described as cowardice. I was a coward. Stroud now admits the cards and the system were stacked against Ford from the beginning. His court-appointed lawyers had never practiced criminal law. What kind of law did they practice? One individual had general civil practice, and another one did succession wills and estates. And a murder trial.

And a murder trial in Louisiana where a man was on trial for his life. And at the time, I saw nothing wrong with that. In fact, I snickered from time to time saying that, you know, this was going to be, we're going to get through this case pretty quickly. Stroud's case wasn't strong. There was no physical evidence linking Ford to the crime. The main witness incriminating Ford admitted in court she'd been coerced by police to make up her testimony.

But what was more important to Marty Stroud was the composition of the jury. There were no African Americans on the jury. Was that by design? At the time of the case, we excluded African Americans because we've, I felt that they would not consider a death penalty where you had a black defendant and a white victim. I was the person that made the final call on the case with respect to jurors. And I was, I was wrong. Caddo Parish, Louisiana is predominantly white, yet 77% of those given the death penalty here in the last 40 years have been black. So when Glenn Ford walks into that courtroom, he's got a count of 0 and 2 against him,

and a fastball's coming right at his head for strike three. It took the jury less than three hours to find Glenn Ford guilty. Afterwards, Stroud and his legal team went out and celebrated sending Ford to death row. I had drinks. I slapped people on the back. We sang songs. That was utterly disgusting. You know, you see Mother Justice sometimes, a statue, and she has a blindfold over her eyes. She was crying that night because that wasn't justice. That wasn't justice at all. Ford was put in solitary confinement in one of the most infamous lockups in America, Angola. The maximum security prison has a well-earned reputation for harsh penalties and harsher conditions.

Summer temperatures on death row commonly exceed 104 degrees. Death row, you have maybe a five-by-seven-foot cell. You're in there every day. You get out one hour a day to walk around, and you come back in. You do that day after day, year after year, and that's it. He was basically thrown into a cell and forgotten. Ford would become one of the country's longest-serving death row inmates. Stroud went on to a successful legal career. But all that changed when one of

the initial suspects, a man named Jake Robinson, told a police informant he had killed the jeweler three decades earlier. Robinson is now in prison for another murder. A court review of the new information found there was credible evidence Glenn Ford was neither present at nor a participant in the robbery and murder of Isidore Roseman. Stroud's reaction when he was told Ford was innocent? I thought I was going to throw up. Nauseous. And I felt my face was just turning like a fever. But then the horror of knowing that yours truly had caused him all this pain. In 2014, Ford was exonerated and released from Angola.

Pictures of his first free moments captured a rainbow in the sky and a smile on his face. What was it like to step outside the walls of that prison? Like stepping in a brand new world. Like breathing fresh air for the first time. I felt good. But that good feeling didn't last. Shortly after being released, Ford learned he had stage four lung cancer. Doctors told him he only had a few months to live.

When we met Glenn Ford, he was living in New Orleans in a home for released prisoners. And that hurts. Just a swallow of water. It felt like a flame. You were on death row for 30 years. Yes. Did you ever come close to an execution date? Came within a week because the judge said he was retiring and he wanted to put a death date on me.

Did Mr. Ford get justice in this case? I think he has gotten delayed justice. Dale Cox was the acting district attorney of Caddo Parish, DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish

DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish DALE COX, Acting District Attorney, Caddo Parish

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Getting out of prison after 30 years is justice? Well, it's better than dying there, and it's better than being executed. There may have been no more controversial prosecutor in the U.S. than Dale Cox. Between 2010 and 2014, his Caddo Parish office put more people on death row per capita than anywhere else in the country. I think society should be employing the death penalty more rather than less. But there have been 10 other inmates on death row in Louisiana who have been exonerated. Clearly, the system is not flawless. Are you sure that you've gotten it right all the time?

I'm reasonably confident that I've gotten it right. Reasonably confident. Am I arrogant enough? Am I narcissistic enough to say I couldn't make a mistake? Of course not. But until this information came out, the state was convinced that Mr. Ford was guilty. Yes. He could have been killed. Yes. And it would have been a mistake. Yes. It sounds like you're saying that's just a risk we have to take. Yes. If I had gotten this information too late, all of us would have been grieved beyond description.

We don't want to do this to people who are not guilty of the crime they're charged with. According to Louisiana law, Glenn Ford was entitled to $330,000, about $11,000 for every year of wrongful imprisonment. But the state is denying him the money. Why? In the original trial, prosecutors said Ford knew a robbery of Roseman's jewelry shop was going to take place, but he didn't report it. Ford was never charged with that crime, but the state says that's reason enough to deny him. Do you believe he should be compensated for the time he spent in prison? No, I think we need to follow the law, and the statute does not require that you be charged or convicted or arrested for any of these other crimes.

The statute only requires that Mr. Ford prove he didn't do these other crimes. So he's guilty until proven innocent in this case? No, because it's not a question of guilt or innocence. It's a question of whether he's entitled to money, taxpayer money. But you say he has to prove that he's innocent of these other charges, these other crimes for which he's never been charged, for which he's never been tried. That's correct.

He has to prove that he's innocent of them in order to get the compensation. That's correct. I'm trying to understand. He was punished for something that he might have done. That doesn't seem fair. You want fairness. Isn't the law supposed to provide fairness? It is supposed to provide justice. You don't think he deserves compensation? I think that the law must be followed. What law is this? I never heard of such a law where it says it's okay to do what they did to me without any type of compensation.

There was some compensation. Glenn Ford was given a $20 gift card the day he left Angola prison. He gave me a card for $20 and said, wish you luck. How long did that last you? One meal. I had some fried chicken, tea, and the french fries came with it. I had $4 in change left. After 30 years in prison. Right. 30 years on death row in solitary confinement, and the state of Louisiana releases Mr. Ford with a $20 gift card. You're trying to portray the state of Louisiana as some kind of monster.

I got him out of jail as quickly as I could. That's what the obligation of the state is. And that's the end of the state's obligation. As far as I'm concerned. What about compassion? Have you no compassion for what Mr. Ford has been through? Well, you don't know me at all, do you? But you have no problem asking that question.

I'm asking because I'm seeking an answer. I'm not in the compassion business. None of us as prosecutors or defense lawyers are in the compassion business. I think the ministry is in the compassion business. We're in the legal business. So to suggest that somehow what has happened to Glenn Ford is abhorrent. Yes, it's unfair. But it's not illegal. And it's not even immoral. It just doesn't fit your perception of fairness. I would say in this case, many, many, many people would see this as unfair. I agree. I can't disagree with that. For his part, Marty Stroud says Glenn Ford deserves every penny owed him. He went to see Ford to apologize.

How do you apologize to someone for taking 30 years of his life from him. Well, there's no books you can read to do that. I just went in and apologized. Do you forgive him? No. He didn't only take from me, he took from my whole family. It sounds like you don't think you could ever forgive him. Well, I don't, but I'm still trying to. Do you think you deserve his forgiveness? No.

If somebody had done that to me, I don't know if I could forgive them. You say you destroyed his life. Sounds like this incident destroyed your life, too. I've got a hole in me through which the north wind blows. It's a sense of coldness. It's a sense of just disgust. There's just nothing out there that can fill in that hole that says, it's all right. Well, it's not all right. It's not all right. Three weeks after we met him, Glenn Ford died, penniless.

His final months, he lived off charity. Donations covered the cost of his funeral. I don't cry. Hold on. There was a tragic outcome. And these tragic outcomes happen all the time in life. It's not like the Glenn Ford case is the only tragedy you will ever see or I'll ever see in our lifetime.

The question is, was there anything illegally done, improperly done, that led to this? And I can comfortably say, based on the review of the record, no, there was not. In Glenn Ford's will, he directs that any state money he might receive go to his ten grandchildren so they can have a better chance than he did. And Marty Stroud? He has asked the Louisiana Bar Association to discipline him for his role in the Ford case.

It was a train to injustice, and I was the engineer. Glenn Ford will be a part of me until the day I die. In April, a Louisiana appeals court agreed with a lower court ruling denying compensation to Ford's estate. As for Dale Cox, he resigned from the Caddo Parish District Attorney's Office. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more. Play it at play.it. The Large Hadron Collider is one of the wonders of the modern world. It's believed to be the largest and most complex machine mankind has ever created.

Buried hundreds of feet beneath Switzerland and France, the collider smashes subatomic particles together with enormous energy. By studying the collisions, scientists have already made a major discovery, the Higgs boson. Some call it the God particle. They're hoping to learn a lot more because after two years of repairs and upgrades, the collider is smashing particles at nearly double the power. As we first reported last fall, the things it's searching for now

sound like they're straight out of science fiction. Security is tight at the Large Hadron Collider. You need an iris scan to get inside. Thank you. You have been identified. The entire complex is buried deep underground. You can see power, cooling. And this is the heart of it. Is this where the collision takes place?

The protons come down this pipe, down this orange pipe. American physicist Greg Rockness showed us one of the four detectors where subatomic particles called protons ram into each other at nearly the speed of light to simulate conditions that are believed to have existed when the universe began. Is there a boom? Is there noise? There's no noise, but there's a flash of light, and the particles fly off, and you're taking a look into basically a microscopic view of the Big Bang. This is what the inside of the detector looks like.

It's stuffed with magnets, electronics, and sensors. Creating a miniature version of the Big Bang isn't easy. Before the particles get here, they travel through a long tunnel that Roknas took us down into during a maintenance break. For 17 miles? For 17 miles. In a big loop, a big circle? In a big loop, that's right.

The loop runs beneath the countryside of Switzerland and France, not far from Geneva. The tunnel is so vast, workers zip around on bicycles. The particles zip through these pipes, guided by super-cooled magnets. When the protons are going through the tunnel, it's very cold. How cold does it actually get? It's somewhere on the order of negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that colder than outer space? That's colder than outer space. Oh, it is? Yeah. Now, I hear that when the collision takes place, that the temperatures spike. They go way high. How high do they go?

They can be up to the order of 10,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. No. Yeah. So it goes from the coldest ever to the hottest ever? Yeah. Like that? Yeah. The data is analyzed by thousands of computers here and

around the world. This is what an image of the collisions looks like, with particles flying off in every direction. Every time there's a small dot here, that's two protons colliding. By carefully analyzing the data from the collisions, scientists were able to find the holy grail of modern physics, a particle known as the Higgs boson, or just the Higgs. The Higgs gives all the other particles mass. Without it, molecules would not exist, trees, rocks, mountains would not exist, we would not exist. There are collisions 40 million times per second. Oh, my gosh. The Higgs may have been found here in the collider in Switzerland,

but it was conceived in Scotland by a person almost as hard to find as the particle itself. Peter Higgs doesn't have much use for computers, email, or cell phones, and doesn't own a TV. In 1964, he was a junior professor at the University of Edinburgh when he came up with his theory. He was 35 at the time and not taken seriously. Not many people took much notice of this kind of theory at the time. They were doing other things, which was why it was left to a few people, a few eccentrics to do it.

Did you use any machines or any special equipment? A pencil and paper. A pencil and paper? That's all you used? Well, that's all you need for writing equations. Higgs' simple and elegant equation gained credence over the years, but there was no machine powerful enough to put it to the test until the Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.

Finally, the collider really did prove that you were right. And in 2012, I believe you were there at CERN. I was there. I was more or less summoned. I was told in a message, tell Peter if he doesn't come to CERN on July the 4th, he will probably regret it. He went to CERN along with hundreds of other physicists who assembled to hear whether the collider had proved Higgs theory.

It was like the Olympics of particle physics. When they showed the money plot, the picture that made it clear that there was a bump, which could be the Higgs boson, there was a gasp in the audience where everyone went, and it's true because it was absolutely clear that had to be something that we hadn't seen before. I think we have it. You agree? Yeah. In the audience, the one-time eccentric teared up. This guaranteed Peter Higgs a A Place in History. It's hard to tell in words. In January, Italian physicist Fabiola Giannotti became CERN's first female director general.

She oversees the souped-up $8 billion collider that 10,000 scientists around the world work on as they search for new breakthroughs that could revolutionize society in ways that are hard to imagine. Is it possible that there's a, and I read this in science fiction, that there's a whole dimension, a dimension that we don't even know about? Absolutely. There are theories, theory in particle physics, that predict the existence of additional dimensions.

String theories, for instance, they require seven additional dimensions. So as experimentalists, we should, with our high-tech instruments like the Large Hadron Collider, just listen to nature and to what nature wants to tell us. One of their biggest goals is shining a light on dark matter and dark energy, which are among the great remaining mysteries of modern science and reminders of how little we know about the universe. When we look at the universe, what we see by eye or with our telescopes is only five% of the universe. The rest, 95%, is dark. Dark meaning, first of all, not visible to our instruments.

Second, dark also indicates our ignorance. We don't know what's the composition of this part of the universe. If we don't know what dark matter is, how do we even know there is such a thing? We have some indirect but very strong experimental evidence of it. For instance, when we look at the gravitational movement of galaxies, these movements that are observed cannot be explained with the amount of matter that we see. So if there's gravity, there must be mass.

Exactly. And the mass that we see is not able to explain the movement of the galaxies as we observe it. Is dark matter here, right here, all around us, all this stuff we really can't see? Yeah, dark matter is everywhere in this room, everywhere. Scientists are looking for signs of dark matter inside the collider, but they have also placed detectors deep in mine shafts and in space. A short walk from the collider, Nobel laureate Sam Ting and a team of scientists receive data from a $2 billion detector they have placed on the International Space Station. The detector is seen here.

So we have now a detector that's sitting on our space station to see if you can see dark matter. Is that what you're hoping to do, see it? To detect the trace of dark matter collision. Astronauts help keep an eye on the experiment. This is real time. Real time, real time. Half a century after he first proposed his theory,

Peter Higgs received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Belgian physicist François Englert. The many scientists who worked on the collider made this day possible. Among them, Steve Nahn, Laura Janty, and Steve Goldfarb, three American physicists who have been working on the collider for years. It mattered. It mattered. Goldfarb told us that he was amazed at how many people went online

to watch the meeting at which the discovery was announced. You know, one billion people by the end of that week had seen video from that webcast. So a significant portion of our planet was interested enough to watch something which was a very technical seminar. Why do you think it's ignited so much public interest? I think ultimately what we're doing has a lot of philosophical motivations. We're interested in understanding how things work, and I think everybody connects to that idea, and everybody's interested when science pushes the boundary of our understanding. We're now into season two with a much more powerful collider. What are you going to look for now? We have big questions, really big questions. For instance, can they find something

smaller than the quark, one of the smallest particles discovered thus far? Is the quark it? You know, we've thought many, many times. You mean, is it something even smaller than a quark? Could be. It's a very fundamental. At the moment, we think not, but who knows? But we're still, we look all the time for that. We looked for black holes, and we didn't see them. Are you saying there are no black holes? So we were looking for micro black holes that would have been, for example, evidence that there are extra dimensions,

but unfortunately it doesn't look like we produced them at these energies. But does that mean there are no extra dimensions dimensions or that you just didn't find them? We just didn't find them. They still could be there. If you find a whole different dimension, will it allow us to change time? I think this is a difficult question because scientists don't like to say that something is impossible, even if we think it's extremely unlikely. If you had asked somebody in 1900, do you think we could, you know, take a device out of our pocket and push a button or two and talk to your spouse halfway across the world?

It's crazy. They would say the same thing. But we can do it today, right? So who's to say 100 years from now what we can or cannot do? I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.