[ISN] TJX Hacker 'Will Never Commit Any Crime Again'

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/gonzalez-remorseful/

By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
December 18, 2009

Confessed hacker Albert Gonzalez's turn as a Secret Service informant 
led him down a dark path of obsession, culminating in the largest 
identity-theft spree in history.

Frances Gonzalez Lago, Gonzalez’s sister, wrote his sentencing judge 
that her brother’s work as an informant for the agency between 2003 and 
and 2008 seemed to act as a reward for his obsession with computers. 
"All this seemed okay at the time, but psychologically it was feeding an 
obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall," she told 
the court.

The information appears in a 24-page sentencing memo originally filed 
Tuesday by Gonzalez’s attorney, Martin Weinberg, before it was sealed, 
along with several exhibits. The memo was unsealed on Friday, with 
several pages redacted. Threat Level disclosed on Tuesday the 
information that was revealed in the redacted pages.

Weinberg is appealing to the court to sentence the 28-year-old hacker to 
15 years. Gonzalez has pleaded guilty to hacking into TJX, Dave & 
Busters restaurant chain and numerous other businesses. He faces a 
possible sentence of between 15 and 25 years under the terms of his plea 
agreement.

The sentencing memo depicts Gonzalez as an obsessive personality who 
derived his sense of worth from his computer skills and couldn’t seem to 
distinguish himself from his PC. When Gonzalez’s computer was infected 
with a virus, Weinberg writes in the memo, he "referred to the event as 
if it were he, himself, who had gotten the virus."

[...]


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