“60 MINUTES” FINDS GROUND ZERO IN U.S. ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE HACK, THIS SUNDAY ON CBS
Illinois Board of Elections Executive Director Steve Sandvoss
Systems Are Still Vulnerable Seven Months before 2018 Midterms and Senate Intelligence Committee Members See Urgent Need to Bolster Cyber Defenses
The threat Russia posed to our democratic process was deemed so great, the Obama Administration took the unprecedented step of using the cyber hotline – the cybersecurity equivalent of the nuclear hotline – to warn the Kremlin to stop its assault on state election systems. Russian operatives had launched a widespread cyberattack against state voting systems around the country. Bill Whitaker goes to Illinois, where election officials were the first to report and defend against the cyber-strike for a 60 MINUTES report to be broadcast Sunday, April 8 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
It began with a call from a staffer at the Illinois Board of Elections headquarters in Springfield to Steve Sandvoss, the executive director. “I picked up the phone. And it’s like, ‘Steve, we got a problem.’ And I said, ‘Okay, what happened?’ He says, ‘We’ve been hacked.’ I said, ‘Oh my God.’” The server for the voter registration database, with the personal information of 7.5 million Illinois voters, had slowed to a crawl. The IT team had discovered a malicious attack. “I suppose you could analogize it to a fast-growing tumor – in the system. It was unlike anything we had ever seen,” Sandvoss recalls.
Today, seven months from the midterm elections, key members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence tell Bill Whitaker much more needs to be done to secure the election infrastructure at the heart of America’s democracy. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) say the U.S. needs a comprehensive strategy to fight cyber-war but concede upgrading systems around the country by the 2020 presidential election will be a challenge. They are backing legislation to set minimum cybersecurity standards.
“This could be the Iranians next time, could be the North Koreans next time,” says Lankford. “This is something that’s been exposed as a weakness in our system that we need to be able to fix that, not knowing who could try to test it out next time,” he tells Whitaker.
The sweep of the Russian operation in 2016 caught the Obama administration off guard. Michael Daniel, President Obama’s cyber czar, envisioned a troubling scenario: hacked voter rolls causing chaos on Election Day. “Lines begin to form. Election officials can’t figure out what’s going on,” says Daniel. “You would only have to do it in a few places. And it would almost feed on itself.”
Asked by Whitaker if the government is doing enough to defend the country from the cyber equivalent of a foreign attack on American soil, Sen. Harris says, “No. We’re not doing enough.”
OPRAH WINFREY AND “60 MINUTES” GET THE FIRST LOOK INSIDE A MEMORIAL TO THE VICTIMS OF LYNCHINGS OF MORE THAN 4,300 MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN, THIS SUNDAY ON CBS
“The National Memorial for Peace and Justice” in Alabama Opens on April 26
Oprah Winfrey brings 60 MINUTES cameras into a new memorial dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynchings that took place over a 70-year period following the Civil War. It will be the first time the public sees the inside of the structure and its 805 steel markers, each bearing the names of people murdered – often with thousands of onlookers amid a picnic-like atmosphere. Her report will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, April 8 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
Each marker represents a state county and contains the names of victims of lynchings from that area. The memorial takes up six acres in the heart of Montgomery, Ala., perhaps the best-known city in the struggle for civil rights. Alabama was also the scene of 361 documented lynchings.
The efforts to build “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice” were led by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative. Asked by Winfrey why he chose to commemorate lynching as opposed to other injustices done by white people to the black community, he says the murderous acts were a way for whites to maintain political control over African Americans, who were supposed to get the right to vote after the Civil War. “Lynching was especially effective because it would allow the whole community to know that we did this to this person…a message that, if you try to vote, if you try to advocate for your rights…anything that complicates white supremacy…and political power, we will kill you.”
Among the more than 4,300 cases of lynching documented by Stevenson and his team was the story of Jesse Washington, a black man accused of a crime in Waco, Texas. One team member, criminal defense attorney Sia Sanneh, found a newspaper account of Washington’s murder. She tells Winfrey it described a crowd of 15,000, many “dressed in their Sunday best.” It detailed how Washington’s clothing was soaked in oil before he was tied to a tree and then lowered into a fire set beneath him. “I think it’s incredibly telling that death was not enough…People would be killed and then shot and then set on fire,” she says. “There are some cases where the body was dragged to the heart of the black community.”
In addition to the monuments displaying the names of the victims, the team has collected jars filled with soil from many places where lynchings took place. Winfrey and cameras record descendants of lynching victim Wes Johnson collecting soil from an Alabama cotton field. The 18-year-old was accused of assaulting a white woman, arrested and then taken from his cell by a mob before his trial. He was shot and then hanged from a tree. Stevenson tells Winfrey, “Something happened here that was wrong…unjust, and too few people have talked about it. So that’s what we want to do today. We want to recognize the wrong that was done to Wes Johnson.”
INSIDE THE SECRETIVE HARVARD LAMPOON – JUST KIDDING!
Sunday’s “60 Minutes” Profile Includes Lampoon Alumni and “Veep” Executive Producer David Mandel, “Simpsons” Executive Producer Al Jean
and Longtime “Saturday Night Live” Writer Jim Downey
The inner sanctum of the Harvard Lampoon’s legendary headquarters remains un-breached. Staff of the satirical magazine would not let 60 MINUTES beyond the library of the mini-castle the magazine has occupied since 1909. But the library was where the action was: 60 MINUTES was allowed in for an introduction to the Lampoon’s selective membership ritual, the first step for many toward a career in comedy. Jon Wertheim also gets a firsthand account from a staffer of being threatened by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer after the Lampoon pulled an epic prank on Trump when he was still a candidate. Wertheim’s profile of the 142-year-old Harvard institution that’s become a wellspring of American comedy will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, April 8 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.
The Lampoon boasts such illustrious alumni as John Updike, George Plimpton and William Randolph Hearst. Wertheim speaks with more recent alums who write for such programs as “Saturday Night Live,” “The Simpsons” and “Veep.” Their careers started with the very selection process 60 MINUTES witnessed, one in which Lampoon hopefuls must prove their competency in humor. The process begins with “compers” telling stories and trying to make magazine staffers laugh.
But the real test for compers comes with the submission of six pieces of humor writing, in a funny-or-die competition that saw just three out of about a hundred make the cut one semester last year. Once admitted, new Lampoon members get a key to the castle and, after graduation, a good crack at a career writing comedy.
The Harvard Lampoon has become a pipeline feeding comedy writers’ rooms in America. It began in the ‘70s, when Lampoon veterans started the spin-off magazine The National Lampoon, collaborated on classic film comedies such as “Animal House” and “Vacation,” and wrote for “Saturday Night Live” and “Seinfeld.” In Harvard Yard, however, the Lampoon is not quite as influential. Just five issues are printed a year, nearly all for campus consumption. “There’s a sense here that we are writing the magazine for ourselves and that no one is reading it,” says current Lampoon president Liana Spiro. “And that, I think actually, is one of the most beautiful things about the Lampoon. That we feel like no one is watching and we can just dance however we want.”
The not-so-serious magazine is perhaps best known for its pranks, which are often aimed at the university’s sober daily student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. In 2015 the Lampoon fooled the presidential campaign of Donald Trump while posing as the Crimson. It was a stunt that got Lampoon staffer Tom Waddick an angry call from Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.
Waddick had recruited some Lampoon conspirators to break into Crimson headquarters and steal the paper’s famous president’s chair. Then, pretending to represent the Crimson, Waddick contacted the Trump campaign and offered up the student newspaper’s endorsement. He asked: “Would Mr. Trump like to pose for the accompanying photo in the Crimson’s chair?” The answer from the Trump camp was a swift “yes,” so Waddick and his fellow Lampoon staff members raced to New York City and carried the chair into Trump Tower. Once inside Trump’s office, the candidate himself greeted them and, after Trump’s hair was styled, it was time to capture the moment. Trump sat in the Crimson’s chair while Lampoon staffers gathered around him. “Donald Trump had said, ‘Everyone do the thumbs up,’ so we’re all doing his sort of signature thumbs up around him,” recalls Waddick. “And I was just like, ‘We got it.’”
But it wasn’t that easy. As he was preparing to publish the photo, Waddick got a call from Cohen. The Trump camp realized they’d been had. “[Cohen] says, you know, ‘I’m going to come up to Harvard. You’re all going to get expelled,’” remembers Waddick. “‘If this photo gets out, you’ll be out of that school faster than you know it. I can be up there tomorrow.’”
Wertheim also interviews Lampoon alumnus David Mandel from the class of 1992, a former “Seinfeld” writer now running HBO’s comedy “Veep”; the 1974 graduate Jim Downey, who wrote some of the most memorable political satire of the past 40 years for “Saturday Night Live”; and Al Jean, class of 1981, who now runs “The Simpsons.”
“60 MINUTES” LISTINGS FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 8
HACKING DEMOCRACY – During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives launched a widespread cyberattack against state voting systems around the country. While officials say no votes were changed on Election Day, America’s election infrastructure remains vulnerable just seven months before the 2018 midterm elections. Bill Whitaker reports. Marc Lieberman and Ali Rawaf are the producers.
THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING – Oprah Winfrey and 60 MINUTES cameras get the first look at a memorial to the thousands of African-American men, women and children lynched over a 70-year period following the Civil War. Denise Schrier Cetta is the producer.
HARVARD LAMPOON – Jon Wertheim profiles the 142-year-old Harvard institution that has become a wellspring of American comedy, and he speaks to some of its illustrious alumni from “Saturday Night Live,” “Veep” and “The Simpsons.” Nathalie Sommer is the producer.
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