Friday, December 31, 2010

Want to remain anonymous for 15 minutes stay off the grid!

Anatomy of a genetic hacking!








The hacker (left) and the hackee!
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HOW MY GENOME WAS HACKED
If a New Scientist reporter's DNA is vulnerable, so is yours
Peter Aldhous and Michael Reilly investigate

"We should have a right to expect that people can't snoop through our genes"

INTIMATE secrets hidden in your DNA could be stolen without you even realizing. By taking a glass from which you have drunk, a "genome hacker" could obtain a comprehensive scan of your genome, revealing DNA variants that help determine your suscetibility to a wide range of diseases, from a common form of blindness to Alzheimer's disease.

That's the disturbing finding of a New Scientist investigation, in which one of us - Michael Reilly - "hacked" the genome of the other - Peter Aldhous - armed with only a credit card, a private email account and a home address.

You might have thought that genome hacking requires specialist skills, and personal access to sophisticated equipment. But in recent years, some companies have started to offer personal genome scans to the public over the internet. Other firms routinely analyse genomes on behalf of scientists involved in human genetics research. In theory, both types of service are vulnerable to abuse by a genome hacker determined to submit someone else's DNA for covert analysis.

Until our investigation, it was not clear whether this would be possible in practice. Could a hacker with no access to a genetics lab take an item carrying another person's DNA and obtain a sample that companies would accept for scanning? Would the sample be of high enough quality to yield accurate results? And would genome analysis companies have procedures in place to identify and refuse suspicious orders?

We decided to find out. Rather like computer security researchers who expose vulnerabilities in softwarecode so that they can be "patched" to guard against makicious hackers, our goal was to uncover vulnerabilities in the way companies offering genome scans operate so that they can be fixed.

Our investigation uncovered some loop holes that might be closed to help thwart genome thieves. the findings also strengthen the cse for additional laws to protect the information contained in the DNA that we all shed continually and leave lying around.

"Just as we have a right to expect that relatives, neighbours, or even strangers can't poke through our medical records without our permission, we should have a right to expect that people can't snoop through our genes," says Kathy Hudson, who heads the Genetics and Public Policy Centre in Washing SC.

Our experimental genome hack began like this: Peter drank water from a glass, which he handed to Michael. Michael's first task was to get Peter's DNA off the glass and turn it into a sample that he could submit to a genome-scanning company.

Michael approached several firms that ordinarily extract DNA from items like dringing glasses and match this DNA against particular individuals, on behalf of the police, private detectives or citizens pursuing their own investigations. He said nothing about his intentions, but soon found a company that would extract the DNA without performing any DNA matches. Some weeks later a vial containing a solution of Peter's DNA turned up at Michael's home.

DNA Boosters

Companies that perform genome scans use DNA "chips" that test for the presence of hundreds of thousands of DNA variants known as signle nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs - some of which have been associated with susceptibility to various diseases. As these chips require more DNA than some from our drinking glass, Michael's next challenge was to duplicate Peter's DNA to get a large enough sample.

This procedure, called "whole genome amplification," is offered to scientists and could, for instance, be used to amplify DNA from small clinical samples in studies investigating the genetic origins of disease. Geneticists often place orders involving large numbers of samples but Michael found a lab services firm that was willing to amplify oursingle samples to produce more than enough DNA to run on a SNP chip. He did not say why he wanted this done.

Next we had to choose a company to perform the genome scan itself. Lab services companies, such as the one that performed our amplification often offer this service to scientists as well. But they do not provide an interpretation of the scans in terms of health risks and other traits - something a genome hacker is likely to want. So this wasn't our first port of call. Instead, we looked at the personal genomics services offered to members of the public by companies such as Decode Genetics of Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Californain firms 23andMe of Mountain View and Navigenics, based in Foster City.

One Genome, Three Views

If a genome hacker stole someone's DNA, what might they learn about their victim? To investigate, we compared the interpretations of three genome scans of different samples, all taken from our reporter Peter Aldhous

A Control Sample

(DNA from saliva ) Analysis by: 23andMe - Lifetime risk* Relative risk**

Condition

Age-related macular degeneration 4.3% 0.61

Alzheimer's disease Not reported

Coeliac diseard 0.1% 0.48

Parkinson's disease 1.6% 0.90Prostate cancer 17.1%0.96

Psoriasis 9.3% 0.87

Rheumatoid arthritis 2.4% 0.72

Type diabetes 0.1% 0.09

Type 2 diabetes 21.3% 0.97

Venous thromboembelism 24.1% 0.97

*Peter's chance of developing the condition in his lifetime; **Peter's risk to the average for European ancestry (1.00 = average risk)

B Hacked sample

(DNA from semen) Analysis by: Decode Genetics

Age-related macular degeneration 6.7% 0.83

Alzheimer's disears 12.2% 2.04

Coeliac disease 0.4% 0.35

Crohn's disease 0.2% 0.37

Parkinson's disease Not reported

Prostate cancer 15.9% 0.99

Psoriasis 0.7% 0.33

Rheumatoid arthritis 0.2% 0.23

Type 1 diabetes 0.0% 0.08

Type 2 diabetes 23.8% 0.95

Venous thromboembelism 8.8% 0.88

C Hacked sample

(DNA taken from drinking glass and amplified)

Analysis by: Promethease software

"Most interesting"DNA variants

Increased risk of Alzheimer's

Increased risk of psoriasis

Watch out for high fat in diet

Increased risk of baldness

Likely to score higher on tests for anxiety

Increased risk of exfolliation glaucoma

Likely to have higher intelligence

Swab Spiker

To gather the DNA provided by their customers, 23andMe and Navigenics use a collection tube into which you must spit about 2 millilitres of saliva. We decided that it would be hard to convert Peter's amplified DNA sample into a form that closely mimicked saliva. So we chose to use Decode's service, branded deCODEme, which instead collects DNA using swabs consisting of a piece of filter paper on a plastic handle that customers are supposed to rub against the inside of their cheek. We reasoned that Michael might be able to "spike" these swabs wht Peter's amplified DNA without Decode noticing.

The terms and conditions for the deCODEme service state that someone submitting DNA must have the legal authority to do so, and that the sample must be taken from the cheek. We wanted to test whether deCODEme is vulnerable to abuse from someone prepared to ignore these terms, so Michael pipetted some of Peter's DNA onto deCODEme's swabs and sent them off for analysis under his won name. As far as Decode was concerned, it was a sample of Michael's DNA taken by swabbing his own cheek.

This is when we hit our only real obstacle. A few weeks later, Michael was told that the sample had not processed successfully. This is possible because Decode uses a chip that isn't designed to work with amplified DNA.

We had two contingency plans, however. First, Michael contacted our original lab services compnay again and asked it to analyse the remainder of our amplified sample using a different type of chip to the one that Decode uses. This company also has terms and conditions specifying that customers must have the necessary consents and approvals to submit samples. Mimicking a hacker who would be willing to ignore these terms, Michael submitted the amplified DNA for scaning.

Second, we made use of the replacement cheek swabs sent to deCODEme customers when a sample fails to process. We Wanted to test the swabs' vulnerability to being spiked with a different source of "abandoned" DNA that might be taken bya a genome hacker - semen from a used condom. Peter sealed the replacement swabs, spiked with his semen, in an envelope, which Michael sent back to Decode.

Both of these back-up plans worked. For the sample of DNA taken from the drinking glass and analysed by the lab services company we obtained a read-out of about a million of Peter's SNPs. To interpret this information, we used a computer program called Promethease, which can be downloaded for free from the genomics website SNPedia.com.

"Like the rest of us, our reporter Peter Aldhous leaves his DNA lying about - but it should still be prvate property"

SNPedia contains information contributed by genomics enthusiasts on the diseases and traits linked to particularSNPs, mostly drawn from scientific papers. Promethease is a tool intended for legitimate customers of personal genomics companies that takes the raw data from an individual's genome scan and relates it to the information in SNPedia, highlighting those SNPs that seem to reveal the most interesting things about the person concerned.

For the semen sample submitted to Decode, we obtained the company's own interpretation of Peter's lifetime risks of developing a range of diseases in addition to a full download of the raw data, again documenting about a million SNPs.

So what would a hacker who had taken Peter's DNA have learned about him? For the DNA taken from the drinking glass, Promethease highlighted a range of SNPs, including those conferring increased risks of baldness, the skin disease psoriasis, and a form of blindness called exfoliation glaucoma. Decode's interpretation of the semen sample was rather different. For instance it decided from an analysis of eight different SNPs that Peter's risk of developing psoriasis is very low (see table above). And while Promethease and Decode both concluded that Peter is more likely than a typical person to develop Alzheimer's disease, they disagreed on the size of his risk (see "A short-lived Alzheimer's scare" below).

In part these confusing results reflect current limits to geneticists' knowledge of how individual variations in DNA sequences influence health. But the science is advancing quickly so there is no room for complacency about the ease with which a genome can be hacked.

Motives for such hacking are not hard to find. In the wake of the US presidential election, Robert Green and George Annas of Boston University speculated that future campaigns could be blighted by the sneaky analysis of a candidate's DNA by political opponents who hope to reveal looming health problems (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 359, page 2192).

For people who are not politicians or celebrities, the most obvious threat comes from unscrupolous employers or insurers - and many countries have already restricted their use of genetic information. But private citizens may also have motives to pry into one another's DNA. A newly engated person might want to know whether their future spouse carries genes making them vulnerable to dementia, for example. Or a childless couple could simply wipe a dribbling baby's mouth to investigate the child's genetic heritage and traits before deciding whether to adopt.

Cost is not a huge obstacle, as the sums we spent would not deter a wealthy snoop. Decode's analysis of Peter's semen cost $985, while the total price for extracting his DNA from a drinking glass and then getting it amplified and analysed by the lab services company was about $1,700. Genomic analysis is only going to get cheaper and more powerful. "The plummeting costs of genome profiling and sequencing make it all too tempting to snoop around in other people's genomes" says Hudson.

Still the results of our investigation suggest steps that companies could take to help protect people's privacy and New Scientist has informed firms that run SNP ananlyis of our findings.

For companies selling genetic analysis to the public, verifying the origin of samples will always be difficult unless sample collection is supervised by a medical professional or some other official witness. It is possible to run lab tests that distingussh saliva and swabs taken from inside the cheek from other biological samples, however.

Companies offering services to research scientists, meanwhile, might consider running some checks to try to confirm that customers are legitimate. Such checks may not be completely hacker-proof, but had Michael been asked for evidence of affiliation to a scientific institution, he would not have been able to provide it legitimately.

Following our investigation, the company that amplified and analysed the sample from the drinking glass is now considering whether it could introduce further checks without obstructing orders. "Clearly we do not want to process samples where the proper consent has not been obtained," says the firm's operations director. "It's a question of how to achieve that goal without impeding the search of legitimate scientists."

"An engaged person might want to know if their future spouse is vulnerable to dementia"

Thwarting genome hackers may also require new laws to protect privacy. One approach would be for other countries to follow the UK which has made it a crime to have someone else's DNA with the intent of analysing it without consent. "Although we are not aware of any instances of this in personal genome analysis, there is a clear rationale for making it illegal to analyse and individual's DNA without their knowledge and consent," says Decode spokesman Edward Farmer. Such laws are difficult to enforce, however, as an earlier New Scientist investigation revealed (31 January, page 3).

Another approach, which could be tried in parallel, would be to make it illegal for companies to extract and analyse DNA left on everyday items, except under specific circumstances. There's no good reason, unless you are a police officer investigating a crime to be doing DNA analysis on a sample from a drinking glass," argues Mark Rothstein, Director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the University of Lousiville in Kentucky.

One thing is clear: if lawmakers fail to raise to the challenge posed by genome hacking, we all have reason to fear for the security of our DNA.

A SHORT-LIVED ALZHEIMER'S SCARE

We have shown that a genome hacker could take someone's DNA and obtain scans that reveal their risks of certain diseases (see main story). But how accurate are these scans, and how meaningful are the interpretations drawn from them?

To get an idea, we compared the scan results for three samples of DNA taken from our reporter Peter Aldhous. One scan was obtained legitimately by Peter submitting a sample of his saliva to the personal genomics firm 23andMe; the other two were from simulated genome "hacks." The first of these hacked samples was semen from a condom, submitted to a rival service provided by Decode Genetics: the second consisted of DNA extracted from a dringking glass, hiich was then amplified and scanned by a lab service company.

The raw data from these scans, which documents DNA variants known as SNPs, were reasonably consistent, according to an analysis performed for New Scientist by Kevin Jacobs, who runs Bioinformed Consulting Services in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The raw data for the hacked semen sample were the same as for the legitimate saliva control for 99.996 percent of the SNPs recorded in both cases. Meanwhile, the SNP data for the DNA taken from the drinking glass diverged a little from the results coming from the semen sample and the control, agreeing about 93 per cent of the time in each case. Why the glass sample gave slightly different results is unclear, but it might be due to degradation or contamination of the DNA of artefacts introduced during its amplification.

Interpretations of the raw SNP data varied much more widely, however (see table above). Most confusing - and initially rather scary - were the suggestions about Peter's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease

LOOK AGAIN

Alzheimer's risk is determined partly by variants of a gene called APOE. 23 and Me provides no information on these variants, and for the other two samples we received conflicting interpretations.

For the DNA sample taken from the drinking glass, the software that we used to interpret the scan, called Promethease, highlighted a rare form of one SNP, which nestles close to APOE and tends to be inherited along with two copies of the risky variant of the gene, known as epsilon 4. Based on this Promethease suggested Peter's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease was between 15 and 25 times that of an average person.

It all seemed very worrying, until we looked at Decode's analysis. The raw data confirmed that Peter does carry this rare SNP, but Decode does not access APOE in the indirect way that Promethease does. Instead, it analyses two SNP's in the APOE gene itself that define how many copies of the risky variant are actually present. This revealed that Peter has just one copy of epsilon 4, and one of the commne variant, epsilon 3. On this basis, Decode concluded that he is only twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's as a typical person - a moderate risk that Peter shares with about 1 in 5 people of European descent.

So while the raw data from genome scans - legitimately obtained or not - are reasonably accurate determining what they mean is another matter entirely.

The new hackers - genetic privacy?

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Genome Hackers
In an era of cheap gene scans and vast DNA databases, will consumers be able to keep their sensitive genetic information private?
Kashmir Hill
Forbes Magazine dated January 17, 2011
The next big privacy battle may be over who has access to your DNA.

It is becoming surprisingly easy for someone to test your DNA without permission. Every drop of saliva you leave on a Styrofoam coffee cup or hair follicle that falls to the floor contains DNA that in theory can be tested for everything from ancestry to disease risk. In 2009 New Scientist writer Michael Reilly "hacked" a colleague's genome using samples from a water glass. He found labs willing to extract DNA from the glass and amplify it, producing enough DNA to send off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. Within weeks Reilly had results predicting his colleague was at risk for baldness, psoriasis and glaucoma.

Amazingly, there is no federal law against surreptitious DNA testing. There is also little regulation of what consumer genetics companies such as 23andMe and Pathway Genomics can and can't do with their data. All this frightens lawyer and privacy crusader Jeremy Gruber, who heads the nonprofit Council for Responsible Genetics in New York. While people can replace a stolen credit card, "you simply cannot get a new genome," he says. "We're only at the beginning of discovering the risks to genetic privacy."

Gruber, 39, has been pushing for tougher genetic privacy laws since he was a young ACLU lawyer in the 1990s. He was assigned to work on a case against Burlington Northern Santa Fe involving 36 employees with carpal tunnel syndrome who filed workers' compensation claims. The railroad company made them submit blood samples before resolving the claims. Unbeknownst to them, it planned to test the samples to try to find a genetic predisposition to the syndrome. The company, without admitting fault, paid $2.2 million in 2002 to settle lawsuits saying it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The case helped lead to a 2008 law, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which prohibits HMOs from raising rates and employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of their genetic profiles. But the law says little about other spheres, such as what consumer genetics companies may do with all the data they collect. Contracts allowing companies to share your DNA data with researchers and other third parties are too broad, Gruber says, and don't provide enough specifics. (23andMe says it never shares data without people's consent; Pathway has a similar policy.) In an investigation of genetic testing companies this summer the General Accounting Office had a female caller ask whether she could send in her fiancé's DNA and "surprise" him with the results. One company's representative was enthusiastic, despite the firm's policy against this.

As gene tests become common, possibilities for abuse will intensify. Banks might not offer you a mortgage if you were likely to die before it was paid off. A pregnant women might secretly get DNA from her lovers so she knows who the father is. Someone might check out a potential mate for genetic flaws. Politicians might dig up dirt on their rivals. Another question: How far should law enforcement be allowed to go? Should prosecutors be allowed to subpoena a company's DNA database of thousands of people if they suspect it contains a match to a crime suspect?

Gruber's advocacy often pits him against scientists who want broad access to DNA samples to come up with disease cures. Researchers were devastated this year when a court ordered destruction of a Texas biobank with millions of newborns' blood samples because hospitals had failed to get parental consent to collect them. Gruber is all for research but says that it is too easy for the data to get into the wrong hands. DNA you leave behind "is different from garbage. It has serious information about you and your family."

He said she said; an olympic pool full of tears; and oh yes a defamation lawsuit?








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Man denies allegations he used sex tape to blackmail wife
Jennifer Yang/
Staff Reporter
December 31, 2010
Manhattan investor David Rucker was out of the country Tuesday when he received a worried phone call from his lawyer.

The lawyer had learned that Lily Shang, the 24-year-old former Torontonian Rucker is in the process of divorcing, was filing papers with Manhattan’s Supreme Court. He asked Rucker: Is there something I should know?

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her in weeks,’” Rucker told the Star. “On Wednesday, we started getting phone calls from reporters.”

Suddenly, Rucker found himself fielding questions about sex, lies and videotapes. According to a court filing by Shang, Rucker threatened to release their sex tapes — with himself edited out of the footage — if she didn’t agree to a smaller financial settlement in their divorce.

Shang is now trying to block the release of the footage on the grounds that she is a “joint author” and co-owns the copyright.

But according to Rucker, whose name is now splashed across the pages of New York’s tabloids, the allegations are “just not true.”

“I can’t figure out in what conversation she thought that I had ever implied such a thing,” he said, adding he last spoke with Shang in November. “This morning, I went back through emails that we had. . . and looked up phone records and that sort of thing.”

“It appears to be a press stunt of some sort, to maybe try to make me look bad,” he continued. “It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Rucker, a 26-year-old managing partner with asset management firm Golden Archer Investments, said he has yet to see the court documents or speak with Shang or her lawyer about the allegations.

When asked about the videos, Rucker said they “may have existed at one point” but are now squirreled away on one of his external hard drives. He said he will likely delete the files if he ever finds them.

Rucker and Shang “were in love at some point,” he concedes, but the relationship unraveled for reasons Rucker refuses to discuss. “Yeah, let’s just skip that part,” he said.

Shang has been portrayed by Manhattan newspapers as a party girl and social climber, someone who once blogged about a life “filled with glamorous parties, beautiful friends, money, politics, and a burning ambition to become something more.”

But according to Rucker, his estranged wife is no club-hopping socialite. Certainly, her Toronto past illustrates a woman of more serious proclivities, with experience that includes serving as a papal youth delegate, volunteering with the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign and studying in an honours program at Wilfrid Laurier University.

The Star learned of Shang’s story Wednesday from her friend and former colleague, Toronto publicist Lowell Hall, who contacted the media before consulting her. Shang’s ordeal was already making the rounds in New York; Hall wanted to pre-empt the story before it spread north of the border, he said.

On Wednesday, Shang told the Star she was “devastated” to see her private affairs in the papers.

She declined further interviews on Thursday.

“I cannot express to you how much grief this has caused her and her family,” her publicist wrote in an email. “There is not enough room in an Olympic pool to fill enough tears I have heard from Lily crying inconsolably about this unfortunate situation.”

Shang earlier said she anticipated Rucker would deny the allegations against him, because “David always says what’s in his best interest.”

But Rucker insists he would never jeopardize his own career by releasing such embarrassing videos. He is now contemplating suing Shang for defamation of character.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Mr. Polar Bear = 1 camera = 0!

2011 year of the social hacker!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

When you're number 2!

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Facebook beats Google as most visited site in 2010
December 30, 2010
Facebook kept a high profile in 2010.
"The Social Network," a fictionalized account of the social networking site's founding, took box offices by storm, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's person of the year -- and online intelligence company Experian Hitwise reported Wednesday that Facebook was the top-visited website for 2010, beating out Google's homepage.

It was Facebook's first time in the top spot, according to Hitwise. The social networking site got 8.93% of all U.S. visits between January and November 2010, while Google came in second with 7.19%, followed by Yahoo Mail and YouTube. (When all Google and Facebook properties were combined, however, Google got a higher percentage of visits).

"Facebook" was also the most-searched term for the second year in a row, followed by "facebook login" and "youtube." The analysis also found that Kim Kardashian was the top-searched person, "Star Wars" the top movie search, and Lady Gaga the top music search. And, in a less-than-stellar sign for the real estate market, "houses for rent" and "homes for rent" topped combined searches for "houses for sale" and "homes for sale."

1-joint for every 4-cans of food limit 3-joints daily eh?

Winnipeg mayor Sam Katz did you see this?

"Judge, shovel your sidewalk or I'll sue!"

Supreme Judicial Court homes: slippery slope
Despite ruling, walkways unclear
By Laurel J. Sweet
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Award-winning court and crime reporter Laurel J. Sweet has been featured in the ABC miniseries "Boston 24/7" and the 9-11 documentary motion picture "Looking For My Brother."
Untouched: The front walkway of Supreme Judicial Court Justice Robert Cordys' home covered in a thick blanket of snow.
Uphill Climb: A steep set of stairs at Supreme Judicial Court Justice Margot Botford's residence is covered in several inches of now from the weekend blizzard.

Almost: the front steps of Supreme Judicial Court Justice Judith Cowin's home appear somewhat cleared of snow. All Clear: Attorney Emmanuel Papanickolas stands in the clear walkway of his Peabody law office.
Facing the first test of their controversial slip-and-sue snow-removal ruling, three of the state’s seven high court justices yesterday flunked the Herald’s spot inspection of the sidewalks, paths and stairs at their own homes.

“Careful you don’t slip and fall,” Supreme Judicial Court Justice Judith A. Cowin cautioned a wobbly visitor negotiating the snow-packed driveway leading to the snowy front steps of her Tudor manse.

Cowin, 68, groaned, then laughed when told the Herald snow patrol was there to rule on her blizzard busting techniques.

“We plowed, we put down salt. We’re doing the best we can,” said Cowin. “I was trying to take some time off this week.”

The driveway was down to wet pavement at the suburban home of Justice Robert J. Cordy, but the walkway and stairs were buried under snow and any attempt to reach the front door would have ended in a search party dispatched to find us. It looked as though the judge’s postman had resorted to kicking a trail to the mailbox. Cordy, 61, did not respond to requests for comment.

A shovel was planted in snow outside Justice Margot Botsford’s house — and the sidewalks were clear enough. But one steep staircase to the judge’s door and mailbox hadn’t been touched and a second required scaling a foot-wide trail carved out of deep white crust. Worse yet, melting snow was streaming down above the entryway, threatening to freeze into black ice.

Botsford, 63, refused to respond to several requests for comment.

Yet we could have eaten off the sidewalk in front of the Peabody Square law offices of Emmanuel Papanickolas.

Nicknamed “The Ice Man,” Papapnickolas persuaded the SJC last summer that the Target store at Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers was in the wrong when his handicapped client tripped on a chunk of ice in the parking lot in December 2002 and shattered his pelvis.

Ruling last July in favor of the client, Emanuel Papadopoulos, the SJC found that property owners must exercise “reasonable care” to prevent injuries by removing snow and ice from their walkways.

“It makes sense — common sense. That’s what’s lacking in society today. It just takes a little effort. Public safety — that’s what it’s all about,” said Papanickolas, who keeps a shovel, three snow blowers and buckets of sand and salt within easy reach at his office.

Sadly, Papadopoulos died in October before the state saw its first flakes of lawsuit-looming snow. He was 84 and “extremely happy,” Papanickolas said.

Yesterday, most justices avoided the slippery slope of the law by scrupulously shoveling their suburban walkways.

Justice Ralph D. Gants, 56, was out Tuesday digging out from the Blizzard of 2010 and yesterday reminded his wife, Deborah Ramirez, to pick up ice melt, she said.

“If we didn’t do it, I don’t know what else you can do,” Ramirez said, when told the couple had earned a gold star.

“He’s his own Jiminy Cricket — his own conscience,” she said of her husband. “As a justice you ask yourself, what’s the right thing to do?”

Chandelier sex anybody?

"The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." ..... Minister of Justice/Attorney General of Canada Pierre Trudeau December 21, 1967

Good Day Readers:
Most would agree what two consenting adults choose to do in the privacy of their bedroom should be of no concern to anyone. However, there are exceptions. Take the recent example of Associate Chief Justice Madam Lori Douglas of Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench.
Newspaper reports have stated unbeknownst to her apparently she was electronically recorded in various sexual acts by her husband lawyer Jack King who then posted at least some of this material on an American pornographic site. If one accepts such an explanation is that not a criminal act?
Then there's the issue of how Plaintiffs and Defendants would feel knowing what they know going before her to decide their fate. Currently there are two complaints against Ms Douglas being investigated by the Judicial Council of Canada which will determine whether she remains a justice. In the meantime, she's been assigned to administrative duties. From various sources familiar with our legal system we've been told the scandal has rocked the judiciary to the core.
Now you have the case of Lily Shang. Why oh why in the age of the internet would anyone allow themselves to be electronically recorded doing the wild thing in their bedrooms or elsewhere?

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk
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From Toronto scholar to New York City sex scandalLily Shang is described as “a talented violinist” by Jay Telegdi, who met Shang in 2006 while volunteering (Facebook)

Chloé Fedio
Staff Reporter

A young Toronto woman who won science fairs, was a papal visit delegate and volunteered for the Liberals has become tabloid fodder in New York over a nasty divorce dispute with her husband involving their sex videos.

Lily Shang, 24, alleges her Manhattan investor husband has threatened to post the couple’s intimate videos online if she doesn’t agree to a low financial settlement.

“A girl doesn’t marry a man without absolutely trusting him — at least most girls don’t. Whatever was done between us was when we were married, when there was that trust. No one could imagine that such a thing could be broken,” Shang told the Star.

Shang married David Glenn Rucker in Toronto in April 2009. They lived in Manhattan and separated after 18 months of marriage.

Shang made the allegations about the sex videos in a court filing. She alleges Rucker threatened to edit himself out before posting them online.

Shang said she was “devastated” when she realized the allegations she filed in court were picked up by New York tabloids, which have characterized her as a “party girl.”

“Divorce is a very difficult and private matter. Unfortunately this has taken a turn for the worst. It’s sad that a private matter has become public in this way,” Shang said.

Rucker, 26, a managing partner and head trader at the boutique asset management firm Golden Archer Investments in Manhattan, told the Daily News he would never release footage that could damage his career. He did not respond to the Star’s request for an interview.

“Would anyone admit to blackmail if you asked them on the record?” Shang responded. “David always says what’s in his best interest.”

Shang’s dilemma is a world apart from her past in Toronto. Her resumé shows an impressive array of experience —an ongoing berth on the Weston Collegiate Institute honour roll, a chess club member and calculus tutor.

She was a World Youth Day delegate during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Toronto.

And she balanced her studies as an honours economics and financial management student at Wilfrid Laurier University with her volunteer work during the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign.

Shang wrote in a blog of her experiences as a Liberal volunteer: “Learning that electric-blue suede pumps, a miniskirt, a blue sweater and Gucci bag can get you enough credibility with the Conservative camp to flirt your way into finding out their numbers two days before the election, only to bump into and be recognized by members of the Conservative camp the same day while canvassing the same poll for the Liberals.”

Lowell Hall, Director of Operations for LH Metropolis Communications where Shang was a summer intern in 2007, called her a “gem”.

“She’s so smart. Smart as a whip,” he said, adding it’s upsetting to see such “a young brilliant lady” being threatened.

“This is what you would call a worst-case scenario nightmare that no young woman could imagine or even fathom to endure. Someone who they trust and loved under the circumstances to dangle something of this nature publicly over their head,” Hall said.

Jay Telegdi, who met Shang in 2006 while volunteering for the Young Liberals, said the party girl persona does not fit.

“She’s really driven. She always won awards in school. She’s a talented violinist. And she’s totally able to accomplish stuff on her own,” Telegdi said. “She wouldn’t have to rely on a man — or anyone else to get ahead.”

Shang plans to stay in Manhattan once the divorce is final. However, she hasn’t ruled out returning to Toronto.
“Wherever I live, Toronto is always going to be home,” she said.

On her website, Shang lists her motto as: In omnia paratus. Ready for anything.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Is Mr. Lack still lacking?

__________________________________________________
An Open Letter to Sony-BMG
To: Andrew Lack, CEO of Sony-BMG
cc: Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, Chairman of the Board, Sony-BMG
cc: Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Entertainment
cc: Gunter Thielen, CEO of Bertelsmann AG
Dear Mr. Lack:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has viewed with growing concern the revelations regarding the XCP Content Protection Software and the SunnComm MediaMax software that your company has chosen to include on at least two dozen of your music CD releases. We are also concerned by your company's limited response to the concerns of your customers and the computer security community.
As has been documented by independent researcher Mark Russinovich and many others, the XCP software appears to have been designed to have many of the qualities of a "rootkit." It was written with the intent of concealing its presence and operation from the owner of the computer, and once installed, elements of the software run continuously -- even when no Sony-BMG music CD is in use. It provides no clear uninstallation option. Additionally, without notifying users, the software appears to contact a remote machine under your control. The MediaMax software is somewhat different, but similarly has no true uninstall option and an undisclosed ongoing communication from the users’ computer to SunnComm.
You must be aware that the discovery of this software has shocked and angered your customers. Software that deceives the owner of the computer it runs upon and opens that computer up to attacks by third parties may be expected to come from malicious cyberattacks; it is certainly not expected nor acceptable to be distributed and sold to paying customers by a major music company. Accordingly, EFF welcomes your company's decision to temporarily halt manufacturing CDs with XCP and to reexamine "all aspects" of your "content protection initiative."
But if you truly intend to undo the harm you have caused, your company should immediately and publicly commit to the following additional measures:
• Recall all CDs that contain the XCP and SunnComm MediaMax technology. The recall must include removing all infected CDs from store shelves as well as halting all online sales of the affected merchandise. We understand from a recent New York Times article that well over 2 million infected CDs with the XCP
technology are in the marketplace and have yet to be sold
• Remove from all current and future marketing materials statements like that on http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html that say the cloaking software "is not malicious and does not compromise security"
• Widely publicize the potential security and other risks associated with the XCP and SunnComm MediaMax technology to allow the 2.1 million consumers who have already purchased the CDs to make informed decisions regarding their use of those CDs. The publicity campaign should include, at a minimum, issuing a
public statement describing the risks and listing every Sony CD, DVD or other product that contains XCP or SunnComm MediaMax. The publicity campaign should be advertised in a manner reasonably calculated to reach all consumers who have purchased the products, in all markets where the CDs have been sold
• Cooperate fully with any interested manufacturer of anti-virus, anti-spyware, or similar computer security tools to facilitate the identification and complete removal of XCP and SunnComm MediaMax from the computers of those infected. In particular, Sony should publicly waive any claims it may have for investigation or removal of these tools under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and any similar laws
• Offer to refund the purchase price of infected CDs or, at the consumer’s election, provide a replacement CD that does not contain the XCP or SunnComm technology. For those consumers who choose to retain infected CDs, develop and make widely available a software update that will allow consumers to easily uninstall the technology without losing the ability to play the CD on their computers. In addition, consumers should not be required to reveal any personally identifying information to Sony in order to access the update, as Sony is currently requiring
• Compensate consumers for any damage to their computers caused by the infected products, including the time, effort, and expenditure required to remedy the damage or verify that their computer systems or networks were or were not altered or damaged by XCP or SunnComm MediaMax products
• Prior to releasing any future product containing DRM technology, thoroughly test the software to determine the existence of any security risks or other possible damages the technology might cause to any user's computer
• Certify in a statement included in the packaging of every CD containing DRM technology that the product does not contain any concealed software such as the XCP rootkit, does not electronically communicate with Sony-BMG or any other party, does not initiate the download of any software update or other data without
informed consent of the consumer immediately prior to each communication, can be uninstalled without any need to contact Sony or disclose personally identifying information to anyone, does not present any security risks to any consumer's computer, and will not damage or reduce the performance of the consumer's
computer or data in any way
We look forward to hearing that you are in the process of implementing these measures by 9:00 a.m. PST on Friday, November 18, 2005.
Sincerely,
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Apple facing a class action lawsuit?



Hello Clare,

I just found your blog and scanned through it to read a few articles. Really like it and think you have very interesting posts. One I especially enjoyed was the Facebook privacy issue plus another involving CNNMoney.com. You have a different approach to online issues that is fun reading and seeing videos on your page.

One thing I noticed that is a key in many of your posts is privacy. Recently Apple was slapped with a privacy lawsuit with their phones and iPads which was the story from CyberSmokeBlog that grabbed my attention. Here’s a video that I think you’d like to see that shows many perspectives on the issue: bit.ly/flYCjK
.



I'd love to stay in touch. Take Care

Daniel

danielp@newsy.com
For embedding videos, follow this link to: http://www.newsy.com/faq/3/
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Dear Daniel:

Thank you for taking the time to write with the kind words.

We believe blogs have and are playing a very important role covering stories missed or under reported by the mainstream media. CyberSmokeBlog has a very catholic taste in the sense of always looking for a broad range of subjects that will be of interest to a wide audience. The subject of internet privacy seems to be getting increasing coverage as people begin to realize how pervasive its abuse has become.

The Apple lawsuit referenced in the video you included was launched by a man in California last week who alleges the company is allowing its mobile apps for iPhone and iPads to send personal information to advergtising netwworks without the consent of users. Apparently the Plaintiff is trying to have the litigation classified as a class action suit which if granted by the courts could potentially expand it to include thousands of consumers.

If you're interested in ditigal law we highly recommend you contact Harvard University's Berkman Centre For Law & Society, as well as, San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation to be placed on their electronic mailing lists - it's free. Both are on the cutting edge of digital law - hardly a week goes by we don't receive updates from them.

We encourage readers to visit newsy.com and hope you'll give us a heads up about the interesting projects on which you're working.

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk

P. S. BTW, you might be interested in the recent letter we just posted from the EFF to Andrew Lack Sony's CEO.

Is your iPhone spying on you?

December 23rd, 2010
What is Traitorware?
Commentary by Eva Galperin
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.

This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.

Perhaps the most notable example of traitorware was the Sony rootkit. In 2005 Sony BMG produced CD's which clandestinely installed a rootkit onto PC's that provided administrative-level access to the users' computer. The copy-protected music CD’s would surreptitiously install its DRM technology onto PC’s. Ostensibly, Sony was trying to prevent consumers from making multiple copies of their CD’s, but the software also rendered the CD incompatible with many CD-ROM players in PC’s, CD players in cars, and DVD players. Additionally, the software left a back door open on all infected PC’s which would give Sony, or any hacker familiar with the rootkit, control over the PC. And if a consumer should have the temerity to find the rootkit and try to remove the offending drivers, the software would execute code designed to disable the CD drive and trash the PC.

Traitorware is sometimes included in products with less obviously malicious intent. Printer dots were added to certain color laser printers as a forensics tool for law enforcement, where it could help authenticate documents or identify forgeries. Apple’s scary-sounding patent for the iPhone is meant to help locate and disable the phone if it is lost of stolen. Don’t let these good intentions fool you—software that hides itself from you while it gives your personal data away to a third party is dangerous and dishonest. As the Sony BMG rootkit demonstrates, it may even leave your device wide open to attacks from third parties.

Traitorware is not some science-fiction vision of the future. It is the present. Indeed, the Sony rootkit dates back to 2005. Apple’s patent application indicates that we are likely to see more traitorware on the horizon. When that happens, EFF will be there to fight it. We believe that your software and devices should not be a tool for gathering your personal data without your explicit consent.

Blogger legend?


Anonymous has left a new comment on your post, "Bad book deal Mr. Assange!"

Forget Assange and his $1,500,000 corporate book deal (some rebel, what a sell-out), instead read a book that’s really been BANNED like “America Deceived II” by E.A. Blayre III.

Last link (before Google Books bans it also]:

http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000190526
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Anonymous:

Thank you for writing. We did some very quick and dirty preliminary research and came away with more questions than answers. Is this a blogger legend? If anyone can fill in the blanks please do. Some examples:

(1) Who is E. A. Blayre III? Why couldn't we find a picture and bio for them?

(2) Can Homeland Security unilaterally and arbitrarily ban a book? Wouldn't a public legal process such as a permanent injunction be required? Where's the evidence?

(3) We couldn't locate a detailed review of the book. Why? What's so controversial it has allegedly been banned?

(4) The only reference to America Deceived II seemed to be via the blogesphere. Why?

Until answers to questions such as these emerge we remain very skeptical.

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Bad book deal Mr. Assange!

Julian Assange's short-sighted book deal
December 27, 2010
By E.B. NEW YORK

THE big news of the day is Julian Assange's book deal. The Wikileaks founder has secured more than $1m in advances for his autobiography from Alfred A. Knopf, a New York publisher, and Canongate based in Britain. A manuscript is expected sometime next year. "I don't want to write this book, but I have to," Mr Assange told the Sunday Times. "I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat." Struggling writers around the world are crying crocodile tears for this man. Woe is he and his handsome advance.

The deal is impressive, but there are signs that Mr Assange's rush to shake hands with big publishers was penny-wise, pound-foolish. As it stands, the contract barely covers his existing legal costs, which he says are approaching £500,000. Knopf will surely do its best to rush the book into print, but its cut of final sales will be considerable. A typical contract would give Knopf electronic rights and Mr Assange 25% of net profits. As the towheaded Australian already has a cult following, it might've been savvier for him to self-publish an autobiography and sell it via Amazon, which offers authors 70% of net profits for e-books sold in America (though the book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99); Barnes & Noble and Apple offer similar royalty rates.

This is why authors with sure audiences have begun making their work available online. "If an author has the choice of two distribution models, one that costs nothing and has no gatekeeper and the other has lots of gatekeepers and costs a lot of money, a lot of people will go with the free one," explains Seth Godin, a bestselling author of marketing books. He now peddles his work himself, having cut ties to Penguin Group in August, according to the Los Angeles Times. And he recently announced plans to self-publish a series of "idea manifestos" on Amazon.com. E-books may still seem novel, but they are fast becoming the way we buy books. E-books now constitute 10% of total book sales, up from 1% two years ago, according to DailyFinance. Recent gifts of Kindles and iPads will nudge that number higher this winter. And Mr Assange's fans are surely the technophillic sort.

Mr Assange may be a fascinating subject for an autobiography, but he's no businessman. Though Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have ceased processing donations to Wikileaks, he could have bought some time shaking down his many wealthy benefactors who believe in his whistle-blowing cause. (Surely there is plenty of fancy junk lying around the Norfolk country mansion where he is under house arrest that could find its way on to eBay without being missed.) But the deal is done, and perhaps it doesn't completely bilk Mr Assange out of electronic rights. Regardless, the arrangement seems fitting for a man whose book will be primarily about trials and errors.

Got caught reading the wife's e-mail eh?

Is reading wife's e-mail a crime? Rochester Hills man faces trial
By L. L. Brasier/Free Press Staff Writer
Leon Walker of Rochester Hills is charged with unlawfully reading his then-wife's e-mail, which showed she was having an affair with her second husband, who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her son. Walker says he gave the e-mails to her first husband, the child's father, to protect the boy. "I was doing what I had to do," he said. (Kimberly P. Mitchell/Detroit Free Press)
Leon Walker is being prosecuted under Michigan statute 752.795, which reads, in part:
"A person shall not intentionally and without authorization or by exceeding valid authorization do any of the following:
"Access or cause access to be made to a computer program, computer, computer system or computer network to acquire, alter, damage delete or destroy property or otherwise use the service of a computer program, computer, computer system or computer network."
Oakland County prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker, 33, with a felony after he logged onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife, Clara Walker.
Using her password, he accessed her Gmail account and learned she was having an affair. He now is facing a February 7 trial. She filed for divorce, which was finalized earlier this month.
Legal experts say it's the first time the statute has been used in a domestic case, and it might be hard to prove
"It's going to be interesting because there are no clear legal answers here," said Frederick Lane, a Vermont attorney and nationally recognized expert who has published five books on electronic privacy. The fact that the two still were living together, and that Leon Walker had routine access to the computer, may help him, Lane said.
"I would guess there is enough gray area to suggest that she could not have an absolute expectation of privacy," he said.
About 45% of divorce cases involve some snooping -- and gathering -- of e-mail, Facebook and other online material, Lane said. But he added that those are generally used by the warring parties for civil reasons -- not for criminal prosecution.
"It is an indication of how deeply electronic communication is woven into our lives," Lane said.
Leon Walker was Clara Walker's third husband. Her e-mail showed she was having an affair with her second husband, a man who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her small son. Leon Walker, worried that the child might be exposed to domestic violence again, handed the e-mails over to the child's father, Clara Walker's first husband. He promptly filed an emergency motion to obtain custody.
Leon Walker, a computer technician with Oakland County, was arrested in February 2009, after Clara Walker learned he had provided the e-mails to her first husband.
"I was doing what I had to do," Leon Walker told the Free Press in a recent interview. He has been out on bond since shortly after his arrest. "We're talking about putting a child in danger."
Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Leon Walker.
"The guy is a hacker," Cooper said in a voice mail response to the Free Press last week. "It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way."
Walker's defense attorney, Leon Weiss, said Cooper is "dead wrong" on the law.
"I've been a defense attorney for 34 years and I've never seen anything like this," he said. "This is a hacking statute, the kind of statute they use if you try to break into a government system or private business for some nefarious purpose. It's to protect against identity fraud, to keep somebody from taking somebody's intellectual property or trade secrets.
"I have to ask: 'Don't the prosecutors have more important things to do with their time?' "
Clara Walker, through her attorney, Michael McCulloch, declined an interview with the Free Press.
In the preliminary exam, Clara Walker testified that although Leon Walker had purchased the laptop for her, it was hers alone and she kept the password a secret.
Leon Walker told the Free Press he routinely used the computer and that she kept all of her passwords in a small book next to the computer.
"It was a family computer," he said. "I did work on it all the time."
A jury ultimately will decide.
Several area defense attorneys were astonished by the filing of the criminal charges.
"What's the difference between that and parents who get on their kids' Facebook accounts?" attorney Deborah McKelvy said. "You're going to have to start prosecuting a whole bunch of parents."
Contact L. L. Brasier: 248-858-2262 or lbrasier@freepress.com

Monday, December 27, 2010

"He was a five-tool player!"

Good Day Readers:
These words were spoken by a U. S. District Attorney familiar with the case of super hacker Albert Gonzalez meaning he could do it all - orchestrate the world's largest online identity theft.
So next time a corporation tells you your data is safe ask if they're familiar with United States of America versus Albert Gonzalez (District of Massachusetts Court).
Sincerely/Clare L. Pieuk
__________________________________________________
The Great Cyberheist
By JAMES VERINI
Illustrations by Francesco Bongiorni
November 10, 2010

Mid-1990s: Gonzalez, 14, is visited by FBI agents at his high school for hacking into NASA

One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes NYPD detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn’t stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.

Indeed, the young man was in the act of “cashing out,” as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that’s when daily withdrawal limits end, and a “casher” can double his take with another withdrawal a few minutes later. To throw off anyone who might later look at surveillance footage, the young man was wearing a woman’s wig and a costume-jewelry nose ring. The detective asked his name, and though the man went by many aliases on the Internet — sometimes he was cumbajohny, sometimes segvec, but his favorite was soupnazi — he politely told the truth. “Albert Gonzalez,” he said.

After Gonzalez was arrested, word quickly made its way to the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office in Newark, which, along with agents from the Secret Service’s Electronic Crimes Task Force, had been investigating credit- and debit-card fraud involving cashers in the area, without much luck. Gonzalez was debriefed and soon found to be a rare catch. Not only did he have data on millions of card accounts stored on the computer back in his New Jersey apartment, but he also had a knack for patiently explaining his expertise in online card fraud. As one former Secret Service agent told me, Gonzalez was extremely intelligent. “He knew computers. He knew fraud. He was good.” Gonzalez, law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com, an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey, Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, “an eBay, Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime.”

After a couple of interviews, Gonzalez agreed to help the government so he could avoid prosecution. “I was 22 years old and scared,” he’d tell me later. “When you have a Secret Service agent in your apartment telling you you’ll go away for 20 years, you’ll do anything.”

He was also good-natured and helpful. “He was very respectable, very nice, very calm, very well spoken,” says the Secret Service agent who would come to know Gonzalez best, Agent Michael (a nickname derived from his real name). “In the beginning, he was quiet and reserved, but then he started opening up. He started to trust us.”

The agents won his trust in part by paying for his living expenses while they brought him to their side and by waiting for Gonzalez to work through his withdrawal. An intermittent drug addict, Gonzalez had been taking cocaine and modafinil, an antinarcoleptic, to keep awake during his long hours at the computer. To decompress, he liked Ecstasy and ketamine. At first, a different agent told me, “he was extremely thin; he smoked a lot, his clothes were disheveled. Over time, he gained weight, started cutting his hair shorter and shaving every day. It was having a good effect on his health.” The agent went on to say: “He could be very disarming, if you let your guard down. I was well aware that I was dealing with a master of social engineering and deception. But I never got the impression he was trying to deceive us.”

Gonzalez’s gift for deception, however, is precisely what made him one of the most valuable cybercrime informants the government has ever had. After his help enabled officials to indict more than a dozen members of Shadowcrew, Gonzalez’s minders at the Secret Service urged him to move back to his hometown, Miami, for his own safety. (It was not hard for Shadowcrew users to figure out that the one significant figure among their ranks who hadn’t been arrested was probably the unnamed informant in court documents.) After aiding another investigation, he became a paid informant in the Secret Service field office in Miami in early 2006. Agent Michael was transferred to Miami, and he worked with Gonzalez on a series of investigations on which Gonzalez did such a good job that the agency asked him to speak at seminars and conferences. “I shook the hand of the head of the Secret Service,” Gonzalez told me. “I gave a presentation to him.” As far as the agency knew, that’s all he was doing. “It seemed he was trying to do the right thing,” Agent Michael said.

(Page 2 of 10)

He wasn’t. Over the course of several years, during much of which he worked for the government, Gonzalez and his crew of hackers and other affiliates gained access to roughly 180 million payment-card accounts from the customer databases of some of the most well-known corporations in America: OfficeMax, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Dave & Buster’s restaurants, the T. J. Maxx and Marshalls clothing chains. They hacked into Target, Barnes & Noble, JCPenney, Sports Authority, Boston Market and 7-Eleven’s bank-machine network. In the words of the chief prosecutor in Gonzalez’s case, “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.”

2003: Arrested in New York for using stolen bank-card numbers

2006: Becomes paid informant for the Secret Service

At his sentencing hearing in March, where he received two concurrent 20-year terms, the longest sentence ever handed down to an American for computer crimes, the judge said, “What I found most devastating was the fact that you two-timed the government agency that you were cooperating with, and you were essentially like a double agent.”

IN APRIL, I visited Gonzalez at the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, R.I., situated by a river and a pleasant place as jails go. Once muscular and tan, Gonzalez, who turned 27 and 28 behind bars, was pallid and thin. His khaki uniform hung on him baggily, and his eyes were bloodshot behind wire-rim glasses. Occasionally a mischievous smile played on his face; otherwise, he looked through the wire-glass partition with a sympathetic but inscrutably intense stare.

He didn’t want to talk about his crimes at first, so in a soft voice he told me about his ex-girlfriend, who had stopped visiting him (“I can’t blame her”), about what he’d been reading (“Stalingrad,” by Antony Beevor; “Into Thin Air,” by Jon Krakauer; essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson), about his thoughts on recent high-profile computer breaches in the news. The public’s ignorance about his chosen criminal field baffled him. He had become a fan of National Public Radio at Wyatt, and had recently listened to a discussion of hackers on “Fresh Air.” (“Terry Gross is a great host,” he wrote me earlier in a letter, but “these authors and co-authors can’t possibly be making decent earnings. Are they?”) He talked about his childhood and family. His father, Alberto Senior is a landscaper who as a young man left Cuba on a raft and was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter in the Florida straits. He and Albert share a birthday with Gonzalez’s 5-year-old nephew, “whom I love more than anyone in this world,” Gonzalez said. His nephew’s mother, Maria, Gonzalez’s sister and only sibling, “always learned by listening to our parents’ advice.” He didn’t.

Gonzalez bought his first PC, with his own money, when he was 12. He took an interest in computer security after it was infected with a downloaded virus. “We had to call the technician who sold it to us, and he came over,” he said in one letter. “I had all these questions for him: ‘How do I defend myself from this? Why would someone do this?’ ” He got over his indignation easily enough, and by the time he was 14 had hacked into NASA, which resulted in a visit by F.B.I. agents to his South Miami high school. Undeterred, Gonzalez formed a cooperative of “black hats” — curiosity-driven hackers with an antiauthoritarian bent — and acquired a reputation. He gave an interview to the online magazine ZDNet under his new screen name, soupnazi: “Defacing a site to me is showing the admins [and] government . . . that go to the site that we own them,” he said. On the side he was also purchasing clothing and CDs online with stolen credit-card numbers. He ordered the merchandise delivered to empty houses in Miami, and then had a friend drive him to pick it up during lunch period.

By the time he dropped out of Miami Dade College during his freshman year, Gonzalez had taught himself, by reading software manuals, how to hack into Internet service providers for free broadband. He discovered he could go further than that and co-opted the log-ins and passwords of managers and executives. “On their computers would always be a huge stash of good information, network diagrams, write ups,” he said, audibly enthralled at the memory. “I would learn about the system architecture. It was as if I was an employee.”

Gonzalez’s closest friend, Stephen Watt, who is now serving a two-year prison sentence for coding a software program that helped Gonzalez steal card data, describes Gonzalez as having “a Sherlock Holmes quality to him that is bounded only by his formal education.” Like the other hackers who would go on to form the inner circle of Gonzalez’s criminal organization, Watt met Gonzalez when both were teenagers, on EFnet, an Internet relay chat network frequented by black hats. Watt and Gonzalez interacted strictly online for a year, though each lived in South Florida. Once they began spending time together, in Florida and New York, Watt, who is 27, noticed that Gonzalez’s talents as an online criminal carried over into his life away from the computer. “He could spot wedding rings at 50 yards. He could spot a Patek Philippe at 50 yards. He would have been a world-class interrogator. He was very good at figuring out when people were lying.”

Like many hackers, Gonzalez moved easily between the licit and illicit sides of computer security. Before his first arrest, in the ATM. lobby, Gonzalez made his way from Miami to the Northeast after he hacked into a New Jersey-based Internet company and then persuaded it to hire him to its security team. The transition from fraudster to informant was not too different.

(Page 3 of 10)

After he agreed in 2003 to become an informant, Gonzalez helped the Justice Department and the Secret Service build, over the course of a year, an ingenious trap for Shadowcrew. Called Operation Firewall, it was run out of a makeshift office in an Army repair garage in Jersey City. Gonzalez was its linchpin. Through him, the government came to, in hacker lingo, own Shadowcrew, as undercover buyers infiltrated the network and traced its users around the world; eventually, officials even managed to transfer the site onto a server controlled by the Secret Service. Meanwhile, Gonzalez patiently worked his way up the Shadowcrew ranks. He persuaded its users to communicate through a virtual private network, or VPN, a secure channel that sends encrypted messages between computers, that he introduced onto the site. This VPN, designed by the Secret Service, came with a special feature: a court-ordered wiretap.

2004-2007: “War driving” — searching for vulnerable retail-store networks

Spring 2008: Being tailed in Miami by the Secret Service

Gonzalez worked alongside the agents, sometimes all day and into the night, for months on end. Most called him Albert. A couple of them who especially liked him called him Soup, after his old screen-name soupnazi. “Spending this much time with an informant this deeply into a cybercrime conspiracy — it was a totally new experience for all of us,” one Justice Department prosecutor says. “It was kind of a bonding experience. He and the agents developed over time a very close bond. They worked well together.”

On October 26, 2004, Gonzalez was taken to Washington and installed in the Operation Firewall command center at Secret Service headquarters. He corralled the Shadowcrew targets into a chat session. At 9 p.m. agents began knocking down doors. By midnight, 28 people across eight states and six countries had been arrested, most of them mere feet from their computers. Nineteen were eventually indicted. It was by some estimates the most successful cybercrime case the government had ever carried out.

“I did find the investigation exciting,” Gonzalez told me of turning against Shadowcrew. “The intellectual element. Unmasking them, figuring out their identities. Looking back, it was kind of easy, though. When someone trusts you, they let their guard down.”

He did say, however, that he “actually had a bad conscience” about it. “I had a moral dilemma, unlike most informants.” On another occasion, when he was discussing the same subject, Gonzalez wrote to me in a letter, “This distinction is very important . . . my loyalty has always been to the black-hat community.”

Those captured by the government with his help are less interested in this distinction. “Shadowcrew was not a forum of thugs,” a member who occasionally laundered money for Gonzalez told me. This casher served two years in prison thanks to Operation Firewall. “He was a coward who betrayed us all, and I suppose if you believe in karma, he got what he deserved in the end.”

Before being arrested, Gonzalez had actually vouched for this casher to the higher-ups at Shadowcrew. He had gone out of his way to help many members, according to the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Scott Christie, who worked with him on Operation Firewall. Christie says that based on their exchanges when Gonzalez was being recruited as an informant, Gonzalez seemed to be “less interested in money than in building up Shadowcrew.” He “gave back to the members in the way of education and personal benefit. Unlike other cybercriminals, he wasn’t just out for gain.”

Indeed, no one I spoke with compared him to a gangster or a mercenary — preferred honorifics among hackers — but several likened him to a brilliant executive. “In the U.S., we have two kinds of powerful, successful business leaders. We have people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are the most sophisticated of electronic technicians and programmers,” says Steve Heymann, the Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney who, in the spring of 2010, secured a combined 38 years of prison time for Gonzalez and his co-conspirators for their corporate breaches. “Then we have others, like the C.E.O.’s of AT&T or General Electric, who are extremely good in their area but also know when to go to others for expertise and how to build powerful organizations by using those others. Gonzalez fits into that second category.”

BY THE TIME Gonzalez returned to Miami after Operation Firewall, in late 2004, he was already exploring the vulnerability of corporate wireless networks. Just as data security had been an afterthought for many businesses in their rush to get online in the 1990s, creating opportunities for the likes of Shadowcrew, many firms had taken no precautions as they eagerly adopted WiFi in the early 2000s. Gonzalez was especially intrigued by the possibilities of a technique known as “war driving:” hackers would sit in cars or vans in the parking lots of big-box stores with laptops and high-power radio antennae and burrow through companies’ vulnerable WiFi networks. Adepts could get into a billion-dollar multinational’s servers in minutes.

(Page 4 of 10)

Gonzalez reconnected with an old friend from EFnet, Christopher Scott, who was willing to do grunt work. Scott began cruising the commercial stretches of Route 1 in Miami, looking for war-driving targets. His experiments at BJ’s Wholesale Club and DSW met with success. He stole about 400,000 card accounts from the former, a million from the latter. He described the breaches and passed card numbers to Gonzalez.

May 2008: Gonzalez is arrested in a Miami hotel. He later directed agents to a barrel in his parents’ yard that held $1.2 million. 2010: Gonzalez is serving a sentence of 20 years

The following summer, Scott parked outside a pair of Marshalls stores. He enlisted the help of Jonathan James, a minor celebrity among Miami black hats for being the first American juvenile ever incarcerated for computer crimes. (At 15, he hacked into the Department of Defense; he lived under house arrest for six months.) Scott cracked the Marshalls WiFi network, and he and James started navigating the system: they co-opted log-ins and passwords and got Gonzalez into the network; they made their way into the corporate servers at the Framingham, Massachusetts headquarters of Marshalls’ parent company, TJX; they located the servers that housed old card transactions from stores. Scott set up a VPN — the system Gonzalez and the Secret Service used to ensnare Shadowcrew — so they could move in and out of TJX and install software without detection. When Gonzalez found that so many of the card numbers they were getting were expired, he had Stephen Watt develop a “sniffer” program to seek out, capture and store recent transactions. Once the collection of data reached a certain size, the program was designed to automatically close, then encrypt, compress and forward the card data to Gonzalez’s computer, just as you might send someone an e-mail with a zip file attached. Steadily, patiently, they siphoned the material from the TJX servers. “The experienced ones take their time and slowly bleed the data out,” a Secret Service analyst says.

By the end of 2006, Gonzalez, Scott and James had information linked to more than 40 million cards. It wasn’t a novel caper, but they executed it better than anyone else had. Using similar methods, they hacked into OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, Target, Sports Authority and Boston Market, and probably many other companies that never detected a breach or notified the authorities. Scott bought a six-foot-tall radio antenna, and he and James rented hotel rooms near stores for the tougher jobs. In many cases, the data were simply there for the taking, unencrypted, unprotected.

“For a long time, probably too long a time, computer security was something that was just dollars and cents off the bottom line — it doesn’t bring in money,” Heymann told me when I asked why war-driving hackers were able to steal data so easily. “At the same time, in these cases, companies were beginning to warehouse vast amounts of information” far more swiftly than they were coming to understand the vulnerabilities of their systems. A result was what he called “a primeval muck that creates a period when dramatic, costly attacks can get at vast amounts of resources.”

At the same time that Gonzalez was stealing all this bank-card data, he was assembling an international syndicate. His favored fence was a Ukrainian, Maksym Yastremskiy, who would sell sets of card numbers to buyers across the Americas, Europe and Asia and split the proceeds with him. Gonzalez hired another EFnet friend, Jonathan Williams, to cash out at ATM’s across the country, and a friend of Watt’s in New York would pick up the shipments of cash in bulk sent by Williams and Yastremskiy. Watt’s friend would then wire the money to Miami or send it to a post-office box there set up by James through a proxy. Gonzalez established dummy companies in Europe, and to collect payment and launder money he opened e-gold and WebMoney accounts, which were not strictly regulated (e-gold has since gone out of business). He also rented servers in Latvia, Ukraine, the Netherlands and elsewhere to store the card data and the software he was using for the breaches. Finally, he joined up with two Eastern European hackers who were onto something visionary. Known to him only by their screen names, Annex and Grig, they were colluding to break into American card-payment processors — the very cash arteries of the retail economy.

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“I’ve been asking myself, why did I do it?” Gonzalez told me over the phone from prison recently. “At first I did it for monetary reasons. The service’s salary wasn’t enough, and I needed the money. By then I’d already created the snowball and had to keep doing it. I wanted to quit but couldn’t.” He claims his intentions were partly admirable. He genuinely wanted to help out Patrick Toey, a close friend and hacker who would later do much of the more sophisticated legwork involved in Gonzalez’s hacking into corporate networks. Unlike Gonzalez and Watt, Toey, who is 25, had a rough upbringing. After dropping out of high school, he supported his mother and his younger brother and sister by hacking. Gonzalez invited Toey to live in his condominium in Miami, rent-free. Gonzalez owned it, but he enjoyed living at home with his parents more. He says he loved his mother’s cooking and playing with his nephew, and he could more easily launder money through his parents’ home-equity line of credit that way.

Gonzalez relished the intellectual challenges of cybercrime too. He is not a gifted programmer — according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code — but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace. I often got the impression that this was computer crime’s main appeal for Gonzalez.

But he also liked stealing. “Whatever morality I should have been feeling was trumped by the thrill,” he told me. And he liked spending. Partly but not entirely in jest, he took to referring to his scheme as Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’, after the 50 Cent album and movie. Gonzalez would not discuss with me just how rich he got, but he certainly was seeing profits in the millions of dollars. Little of that found its way to Toey, however, and probably none to Watt. For himself, Gonzalez bought, in addition to the condo, a new BMW 330i. He often stayed in luxury hotel suites in Miami on a whim. He took frequent trips to New York, where he and Watt — who worked by day in the I.T. department of Morgan Stanley and later developed securities-trading software and moonlighted as a nightclub promoter — spent thousands on hotels, restaurants, clubs and drugs. Lots of drugs. “I don’t know when he slept,” Agent Michael says, referring to Gonzalez’s lifestyle during the time they worked together.

It seems clear now that Gonzalez didn’t mind betraying people. What would come to anger the Secret Service most is that he used information from their investigations to enrich himself. “He would be working for the service during the day, and then come home and talk to me, and I’d be selling dumps for him,” Toey told me, referring to databases of stolen card information. Gonzalez sold dumps to hackers who he knew were under investigation, in effect setting them up. In the case of one Miami suspect being investigated by the service, Toey told me: “We basically ripped [him] off and sold him databases that were all dead and expired. They came from a company where a breach was being investigated by the service. He got caught with the database, and it looked like he’d done it.” Toey and Gonzalez then split the profits. (Gonzalez confirmed this account of events.)
When I asked Toey how he felt about using information from government investigations to betray other hackers, including black hats, he said: “I didn’t like it at all that he did it. But at the same time, I don’t know any of those people.” He added, “More money for us.”

Agent Michael investigated the Miami suspect, but he did not know until I told him that Gonzalez had set the man up. “It doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Looking back, we knew what he wanted us to know. . . . He was leading a double life within a double life.”

BY THE SPRING of 2007, Gonzalez was tired of working for the Secret Service. “He wasn’t showing up on time,” according to Agent Michael, who began talking with other agents about cutting Gonzalez loose. “He didn’t want to be there.” He was also tired of war driving. He wanted a new challenge. He found one in a promising technique called SQL injection.

SQL (usually pronounced “sequel”) stands for Structured Query Language, the programming language that enables most commercial Web sites to interact with their associated databases. When you log on to the Web site of a clothing store to buy a sweater, for example, the site sends your commands in SQL back to the databases where the images and descriptions of clothing are stored. The requested information is returned in SQL, and then translated into words, so you can find the sweater you want. But there is a vulnerability here: such databases in a company’s servers often exist in proximity to other all-too-accessible databases with more sensitive information — like your credit-card number.

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SQL is the lingua franca of online commerce. A hacker who learns to manipulate it can penetrate a company with frightening dependability. And he doesn’t need to be anywhere near a store or a company’s headquarters to do so. Since SQL injections go through a Web site, they can be done from anywhere.

Gonzalez urged Watt and Toey to experiment with SQL. Watt wasn’t interested. “I had objections to what he was doing on a moral level — and on top of that, I took an intellectual exception,” Watt says. “If Albert said we were going to go after the Church of Scientology or Blackwater, I would have dove in headfirst.” Toey, however, said he felt he owed Gonzalez. He began poking around on the sites of businesses that seemed vulnerable — or for which he had a philosophical distaste. “I just didn’t like what they did,” he said of the clothing chain Forever 21. The clothes were poorly made, he said, and the employees poorly paid. “It’s just everything I hate about this country in one store.”

Under the assault of Toey’s expertise and contempt, Forever 21 didn’t stand a chance. “I went to their Web site, and I looked at their shopping-cart software, and within five minutes, I found a problem,” he said, with his customary concision. “Within 10 minutes we were on their computers and were able to execute commands freely. From there we leveraged access until we were the domain administrators. Then I passed it over to Albert.”

What came next was the truly inspired step. Gonzalez focused on TJX in part because it stored old transactions, but he found that many of the cards were expired. He needed a way to get to cards right after customers used them. It was possible, he learned, to breach the point-of-sale terminals at stores, the machines on checkout counters through which you swipe your card at the supermarket, the gas station, the department store — just about anywhere you buy something.

Gonzalez and Toey took reconnaissance trips to stores around Miami to look at the brands and makes of their terminals. He downloaded schematics and software manuals. Earlier, Jonathan Williams visited an OfficeMax near Los Angeles, loosened a terminal at a checkout counter and walked out of the store with it. Hackers working with an Estonian contact of Gonzalez’s hacked into the Maryland-based Micros Systems, the largest maker of point-of-sale systems, and stole software and a list of employee log-ins and passwords, which they sent to Gonzalez.

Now once Toey got him into a system, Gonzalez no longer had to sift through databases for the valuable stuff. Instead, he could go straight to the servers that processed the cards coming from the terminals, in the milliseconds before that information was sent to banks for approval. He tried this on JCPenney, the clothing chain Wet Seal and the Hannaford Brothers grocery chain, in the last instance compromising more than four million cards. His Estonian contact used the technique on Dave & Buster’s. “Every time a card was swiped, it would be logged into our file,” Toey says. “There was nothing anyone could do about it.”

When they pieced together how Gonzalez organized these heists later, federal prosecutors had to admire his ingenuity. “It’s like driving to the building next to the bank to tunnel into the bank,” Seth Kosto, an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who worked on the case, told me. When I asked how Gonzalez rated among criminal hackers, he replied: “As a leader? Unparalleled. Unparalleled in his ability to coordinate contacts and continents and expertise. Unparalleled in that he didn’t just get a hack done — he got a hack done, he got the exfiltration of the data done, he got the laundering of the funds done. He was a five-tool player.”

Gonzalez and Toey were returning from a trip to Toys “R” Us to check out its terminals one afternoon in the spring of 2008 when a sports car with tinted windows pulled up behind them at a red light. Gonzalez became suspicious and turned into a bus lane. The sports car followed. When the light turned green, Gonzalez didn’t move. The car didn’t move. After waiting for minutes, in a static game of chicken, car horns blaring, Gonzalez suddenly accelerated into oncoming traffic before doing a U-turn and turning into an alley. The pursuing car flew by, Gonzalez pulled out behind him, sped up alongside the car and peered inside. Gonzalez and Toey made out a police light on the dashboard. It was a surveillance car.

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Gonzalez had by that point stopped working as an informant, according to the service. Instructions had come down to the Miami field office to start tailing him. Maybe the most valuable cybercrime informant it had ever employed, the key to Operation Firewall, was now being investigated. And the Secret Service wasn’t alone: the FBI was looking into a wireless intrusion at Target’s headquarters that originated at one of its Miami stores. The store, the bureau discovered, was in the line of sight of Gonzalez’s condo, in ideal range for a war-driving antenna.

But Gonzalez wasn’t worried. He was certain he’d covered all his tracks.

KIM PERETTI KNOWS Gonzalez as well as almost anyone in the government. She has worked with him. She has also prosecuted him — though Peretti does not come across as a federal prosecutor. Younger in appearance than her 40 years, she grew up in Wisconsin and is girlish, even bubbly, in person, apt to express frustration with phrases like “Oh, sugar!” Peretti was hired to the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section shortly after 9/11. Peretti made a point of getting to know the agents in the Secret Service’s Electronic Crimes Task Force because she knew that they were, like her, eager to make a name in going after cybercriminals. She lobbied to be assigned to Operation Firewall, and in 2003 she was.

When I met Peretti at a restaurant near her new office in McLean, Virginia. — she left the government in May to take a job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers — she was wearing a blue skirt suit and designer glasses. “She’s got the whole Sarah Palin eyewear thing going on,” Gonzalez had written to me in a letter, by way of explaining that it wasn’t at all unpleasant being investigated by her. But their relationship goes back further than that. Much of what Peretti knows about cybercrime she learned from working with Gonzalez.

“Albert was an educator,” she said, describing their experience on Operation Firewall. “We in law enforcement had never encountered anything like” him. “We had to learn the language, we had to learn the characters, their goals, their techniques. Albert taught us all of that.” They worked as well together as any investigative team she has been a part of, she said.

When we met, Peretti brought with her a poster-size screen shot of Shadowcrew’s homepage as it appeared the day after the raids. Secret Service technicians had defaced it with a photograph of a shirtless, tattooed tough slouching in a jail cell. The text said, “Contact your local United States Secret Service field office . . . before we contact you!”

By the time she was 35, thanks to Operation Firewall and Gonzalez, Peretti was the Justice Department’s chief prosecutor of cybercrime in Washington. But in 2005, even as she was litigating the Shadowcrew case, she encountered a new cybercrime wave unlike anything that had come before. “The service keeps calling me, saying, ‘We’ve got another company that contacted us,’ ” she said. “The volume was getting bigger and bigger. There was just an explosion.”

In the days before Christmas 2006, the Justice Department and Stephen Heymann, the assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, received a series of frantic calls from TJX’s attorneys. The company had been contacted by a credit-card company, because a rapidly growing number of cards used at Marshalls and T. J. Maxx stores seemed to have been stolen. TJX had examined its Framingham, Massachusetts servers, and what it found was catastrophic. According to its own account, for about a year and a half, cards for “somewhere between approximately half to substantially all of the transactions at U.S., Puerto Rican and Canadian stores” were believed stolen. It was the biggest theft of card data in U.S. history, and there wasn’t a lead in sight.

“At that point we had quite literally the entire world as possible suspects,” Heymann told me in May, when we met in his office in the federal court building overlooking Boston Harbor. With his father, Philip, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Heymann teaches courses on criminal law at Harvard Law School. He had been deputy chief of the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s criminal division and then set up one of the first computer-crime units in the country, so he was well versed in the comparative challenges. “If you’ve got a murder scene, there’s blood, there’s fingerprints. If you have a hacker going into a company, the critical information can be lost the moment the connection is broken. The size of the networks might be so large and so confusing that they’re very hard to understand and search. The people involved may only be known by screen names. Figuring that out is very different from figuring out who Tony the Squirrel is,” he said. Heymann had never seen anything like the TJX breach.

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Then, in 2007, attorneys for Dave & Buster’s called the Secret Service. That company, too, had been breached, but this was different. The thieves had managed to access its point-of-sale system. By that summer, Peretti and Heymann had huge amounts of data, lots of potential leads and no clue as to whom they were chasing. “For the first six to nine months, it was tiring, exhaustive, thorough,” Heymann told me. “I’d like to tell you it was also brilliant and incisive and led to the key lead, but it wasn’t.” They were in desperate need of a break.

They finally got one, courtesy of Peretti’s old friends at the Secret Service. For two years, it turned out, an undercover agent in its San Diego office had been buying card dumps from Maksym Yastremskiy, Gonzalez’s fence. The agent traveled to Thailand and Dubai to meet with the Ukrainian, and in Dubai he furtively copied the hard drive in Yastremskiy’s laptop. Technicians at the Secret Service combed through it and discovered, to their joy, that Yastremskiy was a meticulous record keeper. He had saved and catalogued all of his customer lists and instant messages for years. In the logs, they found a chat partner who appeared to be Yastremskiy’s biggest provider of stolen card data. But all they had for the person was an I.M. registration number — no personal information.

In July 2007, Yastremskiy was arrested in a nightclub in Turkey, and the Secret Service turned up a useful lead. The anonymous provider had asked Yastremskiy to arrange a fake passport. One of the provider’s cashers had been arrested, and he wanted to get his man out of the United States. The only problem: he didn’t say where the casher had been arrested.

So agents phoned every police station and district attorney’s office around the country that had made a similar arrest or brought a similar case. After weeks of these calls, their search led them to a prison cell in North Carolina, where Jonathan Williams was being held. He had been arrested with $200,000 in cash — much of which had been intended for Gonzalez — and 80 blank debit cards; the local authorities hadn’t linked him to a larger criminal group, and they couldn’t have known about Gonzalez. The Secret Service agents plugged in a thumb drive in Williams’s possession at the time of his arrest and found a file that contained a photograph of Gonzalez, a credit report on him and the address of Gonzalez’s sister, Maria, in Miami. (He was also arrested with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol and two barrels for the gun, one threaded to fit a silencer.) The file was “a safety precaution, in case [Gonzalez] tried to inform on me,” Williams told me from prison in June. Officials then traced packages Williams had sent to the post-office box in Miami. This led the Secret Service to Jonathan James. They pulled James’s police records and found that in 2005 he was arrested by a Palmetto Bay, Flordia police officer who found him in the parking lot of a retail store in the middle of the night. The officer didn’t know why James and his companion, a man named Christopher Scott, were sitting in a car with laptops and a giant radio antenna, but she suspected they weren’t playing World of Warcraft.

The real eureka moment came when Secret Service technicians finally got the I.M. registration information for whoever was providing Yastremskiy with bank-card data. There was no address or name, but there was an e-mail address: soupnazi@efnet.ru. It was a dead giveaway to anyone who knew Gonzalez. Peretti remembers vividly the afternoon in December 2007 when agents called her and told her to come to their office. They sat her down and showed her the e-mail address. “And they looked at me,” Peretti said. “They’ve got 10 agents looking at me. Three minutes passed by, I was sitting there like a dull person. And then I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

Gonzalez knew the Secret Service was investigating Yastremskiy, but he continued to move databases through him. When I asked Gonzalez why, he said, “I never thought he would leave Ukraine.” The country has no extradition policy with the U.S. But Yastremskiy did leave. “It wasn’t until he got busted,” Gonzalez told me, that he realized his mistake.

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Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin’ unraveled fast. Christopher Scott’s home and Gonzalez’s condo were raided simultaneously. Agents seized Scott, along with nine computers and 78 marijuana plants; in Gonzalez’s place they found various designer drugs and a half-asleep Patrick Toey. Toey was flown to Boston to testify before a grand jury. He directed Heymann and Peretti to the e-gold and WebMoney accounts and to servers located abroad. The servers eventually led them to Watt, who returned to his Greenwich Village apartment to find agents and a battering ram awaiting him. The Gonzalezes’ home was raided, but Albert was not there.

Peretti knew that if they didn’t find him soon, he would disappear. “Albert had said during Firewall how afraid he was of spending any time in prison,” she said. “I knew he’d be gone the next day.”

They found him at 7 in the morning on May 7, 2008, when agents rushed into his suite at the National Hotel in Miami Beach. With him were a Croatian woman, two laptops and $22,000. Over time, he started talking. Months later, he led Secret Service agents to a barrel containing $1.2 million buried in his parents’ backyard. Attorney General Michael Mukasey himself held a news conference in August 2008 to announce the indictment. “So far as we know, this is the single largest and most complex identity-theft case ever charged in this country,” he told reporters. Gonzalez’s attorney assured him the government’s case was weak. Electronic evidence often didn’t hold up, he said.

That was before attorneys for Heartland Payment Systems Inc., in Princeton, N.J., called Peretti in early January 2009. One of the largest card-payment processors in the country, Heartland, which services about a quarter of a million businesses, had been hacked. But not just hacked — owned in a way no company had ever been owned. As Peretti would soon learn from Gonzalez, he had helped the two Eastern European hackers, Annex and Grig, slip into Heartland via SQL injection. By the time Heartland realized something was wrong, the heist was too immense to be believed: data from 130 million transactions had been exposed. Indictments were brought against Gonzalez in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts (where the cases were eventually consolidated). At a loss for anything else to say, Gonzalez’s attorney told a reporter: “He’s really not a bad guy. He just got way in over his head.”

On May 18, 2008, Jonathan James shot himself in the head. He left a suicide note saying he was convinced the government would try to pin Gonzalez’s crimes on him because of the notoriety James had gained as a teenage hacker.

AT HIS SENTENCING in March, Gonzalez, who pleaded guilty to all charges, sat almost motionless. As far as I saw, he didn’t once look back at the gallery in the federal courtroom in Boston, where his mother sat stoically while his father wept into a handkerchief as Gonzalez’s sister consoled him. Nor did he glance at Heymann, as he told the court that Gonzalez had committed the worst computer crimes ever prosecuted; nor at Peretti, nor his old colleagues from the Secret Service, who also sat in the gallery. Gonzalez just leaned forward and peered straight ahead at the judge, as though — the set of his head was unmistakable — staring intensely at a computer.

He spoke just once, a few sentences at the end. “I blame nobody but myself,” he said. “I’m guilty of not only exploiting computer networks but exploiting personal relationships, particularly one that I had with a certain government agency who believed in me. This agency not only believed in me but gave me a second start in life, and I completely threw that away.” Accounting for time served and good behavior, Gonzalez is expected to get out of prison in 2025.

In May, Toey began a five-year sentence, and Scott started a seven-year sentence. Yastremskiy was given 30 years in a Turkish prison, a fate apparently so grim he’s lobbying to be extradited to the U.S. so he can be imprisoned here. Watt, who maintains that he was never fully aware of what Gonzalez wanted to use his software for, and who refused to give information on Gonzalez to the grand jury or prosecutors, was sentenced to two years.

According to Attorney General Eric Holder, who last month presented an award to Peretti and the prosecutors and Secret Service agents who brought Gonzalez down, Gonzalez cost TJX, Heartland and the other victimized companies more than $400 million in reimbursements and forensic and legal fees. At last count, at least 500 banks were affected by the Heartland breach. But the extent of the damage is unknown. “The majority of the stuff I hacked was never brought into public light,” Toey told me. One of the imprisoned hackers told me there “were major chains and big hacks that would dwarf TJX. I’m just waiting for them to indict us for the rest of them.” Online fraud is still rampant in the United States, but statistics show a major drop in 2009 from previous years, when Gonzalez was active.

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The company line at the Justice Department and the Secret Service is that informants go bad all the time, and that there was nothing special about Gonzalez’s case. As Peretti put it, “You certainly feel anger” — but “you’re not doing your job if you fall into the trap of thinking the criminal you’re working with is your best friend.” The agent in charge of the Criminal Investigative Division at the Secret Service told me: “It’s unfortunate. We try to take measures. But it does happen. You need to deal with criminals to get other criminals. Albert was a criminal.”

Heymann lauds how the Secret Service handled things. “When you find out one of your informants has committed a crime,” he said, “you can hide the fact, which unfortunately does happen from time to time. You can play it down — soft-pedal it, try to make it go away. Or you can do what I think the Secret Service very impressively did here, which is to go full bore.” He said that after Gonzalez became a suspect, “the size of the investigation, the amount of assets, all increased significantly. That reflects enormous integrity.”

But Gonzalez did have friends in the government, and there is no question some of them feel deeply betrayed. Agent Michael was the most candid with me about this: “I put a lot of time and effort into trying to keep him on the straight and narrow and show him what his worth could be outside of that world, keep him part of the team. And he knows that, and he knew what good he could have done with his talent.” He continued, “We work with a million informants, but for me it was really tough with him.”

After his sentencing, Gonzalez was transferred from Wyatt to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn (before ultimately ending up in a prison in Michigan). Situated between a loud stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Gowanus Bay, M.D.C. is brutal, even for a prison. Populated by hardened offenders, it is among the last places a nonviolent government informant would want to be. “The place is terrible,” Agent Michael said. “But you know what? When you burn both ends of the candle, that’s what you get.” Even Gonzalez was impressed by the government’s indifference to his comfort. He says he always knew it would stick it to him somehow, “but I never thought it would be this badly.”

“I’ve been asking myself a lot why didn’t I ever feel this way while I was doing it,” Gonzalez told me, when I spoke with him in June. An inmate at M.D.C. who didn’t like informants had recently threatened to kill him, he said. It was his 29th birthday, and the 5th birthday of his nephew. Gonzalez’s sister wanted to bring her son to New York to visit, but Gonzalez told her not to. “I didn’t want him to get scared, seeing me in here,” he told me. Instead, Gonzalez was spending the day reading a biography of Warren Buffett.

I asked him how he felt when he thought about people like Agent Michael and Peretti. “They’re part of the betrayals,” he said.

During the legal proceedings, the court ordered Gonzalez to undergo a psychological evaluation. “He identified with his computer,” the report reads. “It is hard, if not impossible, even at the present for Mr. Gonzalez to conceptualize human growth, development and evolution, other than in the language of building a machine.”

As we spoke, Gonzalez recalled how he first became obsessed with computers as a child. “I remember so many times having arguments with my mother when she’d try to take the computer power cord from me, or she’d find me up at 6 a.m. on the computer when I had to be at school at 7:30. Or when I’d be out with [my girlfriend] and not paying any attention to her because I’d be thinking about what I could do online.”

He reflected on his days with Shadowcrew, and on his decision to help the government. “I should have just done my time in 2003,” he said. “I should have manned up and did it. I would be getting out about now.”

James Verini is a writer in New York. This is his first article for the magazine.