BOSTON-Justice Department lawyers said a former government informant convicted of hacking into TJX and more than a dozen other leading retailers was never authorized by the U.S. Secret Service, which was employing him as an undercover informant, to steal data on more than 150 million credit card accounts.
The Justice lawyers refuted new claims by Albert Gonzalez, the computer wizard jailed in 2010 for history's biggest computer hacking, that he should be set free because he was acting with "public authority" while hacking into the numerous retailers' databases.
The 30-year-old Gonzalez, currently serving a 20-year sentence at the federal prison in Milan, Mich., filed a motion last year to overturn his March 2010 guilty plea on the grounds that his illegal acts were sanctioned by the government which was using him to infiltrate online Internet fraud. Gonzalez claims he was still working for the Secret Service when he hacked into the computer systems of TJX, Heartland Payment Systems, and others.
The Justice Department has asked the federal court here, where Gonzalez was convicted and sentenced, to reject the computer hacker's new claims.
According to Gonzalez, he began working for the Secret Service in 2003 in exchange for staying out of jail when he was convicted of stealing card data and selling it online as part of the Secret Service's "Operation Firewall." He claims his work helped lead to several major indictments and convictions and that he was somewhat of a star within the Secret Service.
