tonight the information super highway. an online network called internet. >> back in the early 2000s, the internet was the wild, wild west. >> nothing had happened up to that point that says, oh, you better be aware what you're doing on the internet. >> we saw the emergence of these websites where individuals could go to commit credit card theft, counterfeit identity documents. this is the 21st century's version of burglary. >> you can buy anything that is stolen at bottom-dollar prices, and that money could be for terrorist financing, child exploitation, human trafficking. there's no way to know. it was a criminal world completely unknown to all law enforcement.

>> as a former fbi agent and chairman of the house intelligence committee, i had oversight of all 16 of our nation's intelligence agencies. my name is mike rogers. i had access to classified information gathered by our operatives, people who risked everything for the united states and our families. you don't know their faces or their names. you don't know the real stories from the people who live the fear and the pressure until now. >> the secret service is the oldest law enforcement agency that exists. the first thing that comes to mind is the guys in the sunglasses and dark suits around the president, the vice president, and that's what the secret service is known for. >> what a lot of people don't know is that the organization was founded in 1865.

it was one of the last acts done by president lincoln. >> it was established to combat counterfeiting of u.s. currency. not until 1901 did the secret service have protective responsibilities so that was some 35 years later. >> before 9/11, the main focus was protection, counterfeit currency, and traditional bank fraud. things like when someone goes into a store and uses a card that's not theirs, check fraud. but in 2001, 2002, we started to notice bank fraud was occurring in a different way. we noticed people were doing it more and more online, but there were no internet cops. these criminal enterprises were not on our radar at all. the global criminal economy that was being created, law enforcement in general was unprepared for it. it was a shift in how crime was committed, and it was entirely new to us. this case started in 2003 when i

got transferred from the counterfeit squad to the fraud squad. there were four cases on my desk when i got there. there was one case with a series of atm photos of an individual who was taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of atms in the new york city/new jersey area. the point of him taking out that much cash that quickly, it bothered me that someone was doing this. and it was something on a scale that had never been seen before where someone could take out $50,000, $60,000 from one atm at one pop. his face annoyed me. it was like a smug look. so at that time i basically took that folder and started at the beginning of an investigation where you are just cold-calling banks and saying, are you seeing what we're seeing? so then banks start sending in videos and photos of the same person with the same haircut, walking into an atm vestibule.

multiple victims, multiple banks across the new york/new jersey area. that face. we later found out that he would order white plastic online. white plastic is just sort of like a hotel key. you can encode debit card information onto it with a magnetic strip. that black strip that goes across the back. so with one swipe of some downloaded software and a little device, you can take hacked data would be reencoded on that white plastic and then use them in an atm. he would walk in anywhere between 30, 40, 50 different pieces of white plastic. some would work, some wouldn't. >> he would often do this late at night, not only to hopefully not get caught but also because after midnight, the new limits would go into effect for each card and for the atm. >> our goal was hoping we would find a pattern and we would do

surveillance on those atm machines and then hopefully grab him that way. but he was very good about not using the same one twice and about randomizing how he went about it. the only thing we knew was the picture and the videos that we had from those atm vestibules. so we became extremely frustrated because we had zero other leads for months. but no matter how smart someone is, arrogance always comes with it. no matter how good you are, you will eventually slip. so we waited, and one day we got a call from nypd, who said, i think they have your guy. >> an individual had just been arrested using a new york atm machine. he was dressed very strangely, and he was at an atm machine for over 15, 20 minutes because of

cashing out before the end of the day and the beginning of the next day. we were pret >> we were pretty pumped up. i sent two agents into new york agency, into that priyanecinct verify whether that was him. they said, this is our guy. that's when we found out his name was albert gonzalez. when he was in the holding cell is when we finally realized he was wearing a wig and he ended up taking it off and handed it over with a smile because he knew that the one piece of evidence we were always going to have was an atm photo. so he had to have some type of disguise in order to really prevent us from i.d.'ing him. ultimately we wanted information from him. we wanted to know how he was doing it because we hadn't really seen it before, and we wanted to know who he was working with. there was no way he was doing this alone. the agents attempted to talk to albert gonzalez and to see whether or not he was going to cooperate. and at that point in time, the answer was emphatically no.

so we left. time was on our side with him. when you look at someone who is pretty thin, seems like more of a white collar type criminal, seems scared, the best thing you can do is to leave them there and let them get mixed in with some of those more hardened criminals. >> albert was a drug user. he was a very frail individual. he was very scared of going to prison. >> so it took 24 hours for him to call us and say, i want to talk. and the first condition of that conversation had to be that he had to give us permission to search his apartment. so he agreed to sign what's called a consent to search, and we went to carney, new jersey. it was a studio apartment. typically when you do a search warrant, it's not like the movies where you go in and start ransacking the place. you want to be pretty methodical about what you do. the apartment was not well kept.

it was pretty messy. he had all of the white plastic spread out on a table, and we found upwards of 30 different computer books, programming, networking, stacked up in a corner. the binders were broken, and they were highlighted and there were notes in them. >> and they saw all these hard drives, keyboards, and the screens that he was using. we realized that this was something larger than what we had expected. it dawned on me then that albert was involved in hacking, and this was going to be something big. and that's when everything changed. what does help for heart failure look like? ♪the beat goes on it looks like emily cooking dinner for ten.

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after albert gonzalez is arrested by nypd for atm fraud, he gave us permission to search everything in his apartment. and we found upwards of 30 different computer books, programming, networking, stacked up in a corner. it dawned on me then that albert was involved in hacking, and this was going to be something big. and then we found $30,000 in cash in a black box, a massive amount of ecstasy, ketamine. being in a school zone and

having that much drugs sometimes doubles the sentencing. he was looking at 20 years in prison for just what we had in his apartment, and so he wanted a reduced sentence, and we wanted an introduction into his world. ultimately we wanted information from him. we wanted to know how he was hacking credit card data, and we wanted to know who he was working with. there was no way he was doing this alone. and it had to be on the internet because it was too complex. it really sets a level of intrigue. what is he doing? how far is he taking it? who is this guy? for the secret service to investigate cases like this, it's a huge risk. when i started briefing bosses about this, no one was a fan. investigations back in the day were street investigations. you arrested somebody in the physical world in person. bosses would come by and say, look, there's no criminals in

your computer. get out on the streets and arrest someone. it was not a traditional physical world that we were used to. >> the secret service does not like risk. failure is not an option. >> it was a complex case. it was we're not really sure what you have. we're not really sure if we're going to support it. >> but without risk, there's no reward. >> nobody really knew where this investigation was going to end up, what we were going to be able to uncover, and i think that's what's intrigued a lot of people to go ahead and take a chance and move forward with the investigation. >> so the bail was dropped, and he was turned over to us. once i started debriefing him, i wanted to know how he started from his first hacks all the way up into the day that he was arrested. albert was born and raised in miami. he learned computers as a kid. he was self-taught. his first computer ended up getting malware on it. it annoyed him, and his goal was to figure out how it happened

and who did it, and that's how he got into computers. >> and over time, albert became capable of just about anything when it comes to computers, network intrusions, et cetera. >> we learned that albert had been involved in intrusions or attempted intrusions into nasa and to the government of india also. he was 14 years old at the time. >> it became a game to him. >> so what we learned through the debriefings with him was that he was conducting criminal activity through a global criminal website for hacking and fraud with 4,000 members called shadowcrew. this was a completely new criminal enterprise that only operated online. this was so unique and so new and so unfathomable, and they were completely anonymous. so what we learned through the briefings with him is that shadowcrew was started by two

individuals in the u.s. about a year before albert gonzalez's arrest. >> shadowcrew was a global marketplace for online crime. these hackers are hacking into company systems in order to get access to credit card information of consumers and sell it. all of this was completely new. i mean we had been investigating hackers. most of the time it was solo, lone wolf hackers. and this was now organized criminal groups online. this was identity theft on a scale we had never seen. >> the shadowcrew website was a black and blue site that said "shadowcrew" across the top, and underneath it, their logo was "for those who like to play in the shadows." >> the web page had various rows in it that were dedicated to certain forums, organized in a way that you could identify the types of criminals you wanted to interact with. >> if you've ever seen the movie "star wars," when they're looking for someone to fly them somewhere, they go into this one

bar and they have all these funky creatures operating. that's kind of what these websites were. you had all these different characters that specialized in alt types of financial crime that were available for hire. >> it was an ebay for cybercrime. the scale, the breadth, the depth, the speed at which it moved just completely wiped out any type of case that you would have in the physical world of traditional investigation. >> some of the things you could buy were stolen identity documents, stolen credit card information, health care card, a driver's license, maybe a passport. another item was the fullz, full wallet. >> what they referred to as full info where not only did you have the card number but you had everything about the victim's identity, where they lived, their social security number. >> but it wasn't just a one-stop shop for identity theft. there were tutorials, for instance, about what countries to go to that don't have extradition treaties, how to hack with anonymity.

what was shocking to me is the criminals had no shame and posting about their criminal activity fairly openly. >> information is power. information is the new currency, and you can take any type of information that you can get that you're not supposed to have and use it against people for blackmail. you can use it to profit from. >> you may be arrested for a crime that you didn't commit. >> you don't realize the significance until you become a victim. cybercrime was the level now that was almost out of control. it was a dangerous trend. >> shadowcrew needed to be stopped. cybercrime was new and evolving, and the secret service had to learn how to conduct these investigations. and so the secret service offered albert a deal that quite frankly he couldn't refuse. if he helped us as an informant, we would help him. >> what did you want him to help you do? >> take down shadowcrew.

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after albert gonzalez was arrested, the secret service became aware of an international hacking organization called shadowcrew. >> never in my wildest dreams that i think that in 2003-2004, we were going to find one person

in manhattan who was going to open up an entirely new world for us. >> and so we offered albert a deal that if we got the charges dropped, he would have to be an informant fighting cybercrime in the federal government's investigation into shadowcrew. >> when albert agreed to cooperate and became an informant, the idea was to send him back in to the shadowcrew site and introduce a number of us in an undercover capacity so that we could collect our own intelligence and our own information. but there were a number of stresses right up front. one of them being where were we going to do this? it's not like he could walk into a secret service office and plug in and get a secret service ip address and go log into shadowcrew because we knew shadowcrew was blocking ip addresses, and if he had logged in from a government agency, the whole thing would have been blown. so we had to find a location,

one that was anonymous. it had to have high speed internet. we had to fill it with servers and computers to record everything we wanted and we had to do this all within a certain period of time because we were worried he was going to get found out. var . so we chose a location in jersey city on an old army base, and then i needed help from other agents. >> you want to bring in people that have subject matter expertise, whether it's task force related, whether it's signer. >> so i basically went around and recruited five other agents that had different backgrounds and we decided to call it operation firewall. firewalls keep people out, and that was really the only term that i knew that was technical related, and it sounded cool. >> we also had a trial attorney assigned to us, and that attorney was kim peretti. >> in 2003, i was working at the department of justice's computer

crime section in washington, d.c. >> kim had a very challenging job in that she had to take all this information and put it in a way where we could convince a jury, judges, and others that this case should be prosecuted. >> it was exciting, and it was something we needed to figure out how to investigate. it was all new territory. so in the bunker, there was a large room with computer screens where they were monitoring the activity on shadowcrew. >> the agents that not only had a visual of the source but could also see everything that albert was typing. >> at this point, albert wasn't communicating that well. we had taken all of his drugs. we had taken all of his money, and he was going through withdrawal. you could see it in his face. you could see it in his weight loss that he was struggling. so i ended up kind of nursing him along, and he eventually started to think a little more

clearly. his interaction was more social. we started to worry about him a little bit less, and i think he learned how to get a different high in that cat and mouse game that other informants get of being able to play both sides. so albert was guiding us on it. so we would have conversations and say, let's go do "x." then he would put his brain on top of it and go, no, we need to go do "y." that's not going to work for us. i'm going to get found out. the whole thing is going to get blown. he was a good teacher, so we learned from him. we found out the structure of shadowcrew was set up like the mafia of people who were bosses all the way down to customers. >> the highest level role was the administrator. they were really the ceo, and they were in charge of deciding the strategy of the criminal organization and also day to day functions of the site. >> then you had about 3,900 users. >> so in order to build our case

and charge criminals, we had to buy things from those criminals using the shadowcrew website. >> albert had a number of screen jam names, but the main screen name was couple ba johnny. >> they were using albert to purchase contraband from other individuals to build cases against those individuals. >> we bought credit cards, passports, driver's licenses, cashier's checks, albert had to continually introduce new agents in an undercover capacity and vouch for them. >> were you a member of shadowcrew? >> yeah. >> what was your screen name? >> i'm not giving up my screen name. >> why can't you tell me? >> um, i don't know. i can tell you mine. i won't tell you anyone else's. okay. so i was eating one to two chocolate wendy's frosties a

day. i think they're around 1,500 calories. and i looked at my frosty drink while i was trying to figure out what screen name to use, and i started calling myself mr. frosty. we were making it up as we went along. fake ityou make it. we started to amass physical evidence. it was fast and easy to buy stolen goods. the hard part was who did we just buy them from? >> it's very scary, and what people could do with this information was even scarier. a criminal can live a completely different life under somebody else's identity and can do massive heists into financial services companies and other companies. >> just like they could knock down your door and rob you and beat you. it's just the same in the virtual world, but they don't have to leave their house. >> we started to realize that the only way for us to really have an impact was to take over the website so that we could

basically destroy the entire criminal network. and in this world, add minutes ran the site. they were the bosses. so we needed albert to get promoted up through the ranks and to become an admin. his ability to talk to the hacking world and our ability to give him the direction he needed elevated him very, very quickly through shadowcrew. and he ultimately started gaining more authority than other people to the point where albert was elected as an admin. >> albert worked his way up the organization to a level that people in shadowcrew and even other rival organizations trusted because cumbajohnny, that had a name. albert was a gold mine. >> and so now the ultimate goal was to take the top targets,

build cases against them, identify them, and arrest them all at once. >> but these individuals didn't think they could be discovered because there was no physical meetings. >> they thought they couldn't be touched. they thought they were teflon. >> was this person sitting in new york at an internet cafe? were they at a government office in russia? we knew what shadowcrew was doing. we knew how they were doing it. we just didn't know who they were. ing or two. even a- (ernie) lost rubber duckie? (burke) you mean this one? (ernie) rubber duckie! (cookie) what about a broken cookie jar? (burke) again, cookie? (cookie) yeah. me bad. (grover) yoooooow! oh! what about monsters having accidents? i am okay by the way! (burke) depends. did you cause the accident, grover? (grover) cause an accident? maybe... (bert) how do you know all this stuff? (burke) just comes with experience. (all muppets) yup. ♪ we are farmers. ♪ bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum

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we'd amassed all this evidence, and we had built great cases against the members of an international hacking website called shadowcrew. but it wasn't like the traditional investigation. these criminals were able to hide behind the internet. at that time all we had identified was the screen name that would pop up on the chat when we would communicate with them. >> these are human beings. you need to know their name, their address, where they are and who they are in order to be able to prosecute the individuals and arrest them. some of the nicknames they used were deck, macgyver, develop our, d and d silencer. >> mintfloss, liquid technique. >> we can't arrest mintfloss, velo velour, or scarface. you can't arrest somebody if you don't know who they are. >> many of the shadowcrew members had never talked to each other, had never met in person.

their interactions were completely online. >> most of their efforts went into anonymity. we needed to take the digital world and push it into the physical world if we were residereally going to take this down. the next step is identification. that was where most of the effort went pretty quickly, but we weren't doing that well in identifying them. we spent months striking out. i'm taking a lot of risk here because i'm running this investigation, and i was completely stressed out. we'd get an ip address, we'd find it. that's a 70-year-old female in wisconsin. there's no way that's her. they were using her ip address to do their illegal activity. >> and we were also trying to pull everything we could out of every chat they had, every post they made for clues on who they were and where they were. one of the great examples i recall is taking the handle that someone used, the online nickname, and running it in google to discover that they had

also used that online name to sell their father's car online. so we were able to piece together pieces from the physical world with the criminal world to ultimately identify who they were. >> it was very much a cat-and-mouse game. but how we really broke the case, albert came up with an idea of a vpn. a vpn is a virtual private network, an anonymizing service that encrypts your internet activity, which means law enforcement can't see it. so we had built up albert's reputation so much on shadowcrew that he then had the ability to very easily say to folks, hey, use the vpn. you'll never get caught. and what they didn't realize is that we were wiretapping everything that they were doing. >> and then we were able to identify the ip address that was used to log into the vpn and

trace it back to an actual home from where they were connecting. >> we started matching a real name to a screen name pretty quickly. we were using their own technology against them. the vpn really changed the game. so now all of our focus was to put agents on the ground to start physically identifying these people by bringing the new world back into the old world. >> it's a traditional law enforcement technique that ultimately finds these people out. with one of these individuals, the agents did a ruse and pretended to deliver a pizza to the individual's house. he never had ordered a pizza, but what he did, since he was talking to our source at the time online, he came back and said, can you believe that someone just tried to deliver a pizza to my house? >> you used whatever resources you need to get what you want. doj only gave us permission to

wiretap for 30 days. so we had to do a takedown. >> there's no way i can apprehend 4,000 individuals. that's where you really have to have these strategy sessions to figure out which are those individuals that we believe will have the biggest impact if they're arrested and taken offline. >> the ultimate goal was to take the top targets and arrest them all at once. it was a high bar. >> we wanted to indict them for credit card fraud, for identity theft, for wire fraud, for access device fraud, and computer fraud and unauthorized computer access. >> our target list had boiled down to 28 people. 21 of those were in the u.s. 7 were scattered between seven different countries. >> one of these countries ies wn south america. a predominant amount were in europe. >> belarus, sweden, poland, the uk. but how do you take 28 people across the globe and arrest them all at once?

>> the good thing is that a secret service is able to leverage the relationships with our law enforcement partners in these different countries to help apprehnd these individuals overseas. >> and the idea was to get all the top targets together all at the same time, in front of their computers to that vpn for some big announcement. the announcement we were going to make that we thought would lure enough people into being online was that albert was going to retire as the administrator of the site and hopefully turn it over to someone else. >> albert became almost a rock star in the community itself. him making an announcement, people are going to pay attention. >> we had to make sure that this was all done simultaneous so that they could not encrypt their data, destroy their data, or flee. >> it had to be perfectly timed. >> because once any one of the thousands of members thought or

knew that law enforcement was behind the shadowcrew organization, it was over. each of these individuals likely had a stash of counterfeit identity documents, and they could disappear in a moment's time forever. >> if we didn't execute the takedown perfectly, we would blow the whole case. we're honored to have you on campus for the official visit. aflac! coach saban, how is aflac's program different from health insurance? well aflac gives you money directly, for things health insurance doesn't cover. aflac! we put together a little highlight reel for you. here's aflac helping you with your deductible... copays...out of pocket costs. you look good paying bills.

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the shadowcrew website target list had boiled down to 28 people because those were the 28 people that we could identify. and we had to do a takedown. the idea was to lure those people online together into a virtual private network all at once for a big announcement, that albert was going to retire as the administrator of the site and hopefully turn it over to someone else. so we could do a simultaneous international takedown and arrest these people. a year and a half of an investigation, and all the good and the bad built up to october 26th, 2004. >> we chose sunday because that was the night that we knew we had the highest percentage to have individuals sitting at their computers.

we wanted their computers because their computers likely have the evidence we're looking for to corroborate our story and our transactions and identify additional transactions. if the criminals knew we were going to be searching their premises, they might press a button and delete the evidence. in our case, a no-knock warrant was critical. >> a no-knock warrant is you don't knock on the door. you knock the door down. >> we had to convince judges to allow us to use flash-bangs to actually shock them from getting away from their keyboards so they wouldn't encrypt data. flash bangs are typically used for guns, drugs, high-crime areas where you want to sort of shock folks, and we wanted to make sure there was a bang involved in it. >> but we did feel being like it was such a logistic nightmare that there was a chance that all of a sudden, poof, the smoke goes off and there's nobody behind that keyboard.

>> the entire takedown was going to be coordinated out of headquarters. there was a command center where all of the bosses and headquarters people were, and then just like it started, it was me and albert in a room on a computer. >> we had to disperse teams to all the locations globally. we had multiple screens. we had all of our locations mapped out on the map. >> around 4:00 p.m. is when we started to get online and started to chat. around 6:00, we got enough targets online, and we started the conversation of "this is the announcement." >> we moved like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. when the teams were in place, the team member agent would give the high sign. and once all 28 high signs were up, we went for it. >> and almost every chat went dark.

>> we were getting realtime information on what was occurring in the field. it was nerve-racking because we saw in one case, agents reporting back that someone was jumping out of a window. other cases, criminals were in a car, and there was a car chase. >> the arrests occurred everywhere from new york to phoenix to california, countries like belarus, sweden, poland, the uk. >> every time we had a successful arrest, we would announce it in the room, and the whole room would erupt in cheers. it's like you score a touchdown. >> as part of the shadowcrew takedown, we arrested 28 individuals. we seized over 100 computers, and we executed 27 search warrants. >> about an hour after the takedown, what we did was we changed their front page to say the secret service has been monitoring your criminal activity. contact us before we contact you. we locked the website so nobody could access any of the information on it anymore, and

all they could see is that front page. >> the amount of information we were able to obtain, the success we had in identifying and apprehending the individuals were beyond our wildest dreams. >> out of the original 28 that were arrested, all 28 pled guilty because we built a phenomenal case against them. there was no way out of it. >> we wanted to send a message to these organizations that they weren't untouchable by law enforcement, and law enforcement had the ability to pursue them and apprehend them. >> we were ecstatic. we were proud of each other, and we were able to look at each other and go, holy shit, we just did this, and no one else has. i'm sure albert was conflicted. he was responsible for helping us make these arrests, and these were people that he built relationships with over the years. i liked him. i wouldn't have worked with him as long as i did if i didn't like him. i had a level of respect for him

that anyone would have with someone who is extremely intelligent and knows something that you know nothing about and is willing to teach you. >> after operation firewall, there was a disruption in the hacker community. they speculated that somebody was an informant. >> we were worried about albert's safety. we didn't want him to stay in new jersey, so we sent him back to miami to live with his family. we thought that was a good place for him to sort of settle down, get a little more grounded and back into a normal life while we figured out what to do next. >> about a year later, i got transferred to miami in june of 2005. and i started working with albert again after the firewall takedown around november of 2005. >> doing what? >> same exact thing. we started getting a target list

together, but it came to a point where we weren't making the arrests i thought we should be making, and albert was losing interest. so he wasn't showing up on time, wasn't showing up at all, and i didn't want him there if his head wasn't in the game and he really didn't want to be there. so in the spring of 2007, i asked him to leave, and we cut ties. >> millions of shoppers may have had their credit card information ripped off. somebody hacked into a computer system used by some popular department stores right here in our area. >> the intrusion was first noticed in december and reported to authorities. visa alone estimates 20 million of their cards were involved in the breach. >> since the success of operation firewall, the secret service had continued to investigate online crime, and several years later there was a series of high-profile data breaches that were reported. so we began working with the secret service to investigate.

>> 40 million credit card and debit numbers from t.j. maxx. as we're seeing, this conspiracy stretched far beyond t.j. maxx. we're also looking at nine other retailers. >> dave & buster's, office max, sports authority, barnes & noble. >> companies were getting hacked at an alarming rate, and they were stealing credit card numbers. >> we thought these crimes were connected. then when we started investigating and were able to pull the malicious files and code they were using on systems and match them to other victims, we knew they were connected. >> the talent that was needed to do that was at the top of the list. >> we started linking those attacks to different individuals and criminal groups, and it appeared that one of the online handles we had been looking at that was involved in some of these data breaches was actually linked to albert gonzalez through an email address. >> after everything that we did, to then find out that he was screwing all of us behind our back, that's a tough pill to

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for people with hearing loss, visit sprintrelay.com. what are you doing back there, junior? since we're obviously lost, i'm rescheduling my xfinity customer service appointment. ah, relax. i got this. which gps are you using anyway? a little something called instinct.

been using it for years. yeah, that's what i'm afraid of. he knows exactly where we're going. my whole body is a compass. oh boy... the my account app makes today's xfinity customer service simple, easy, awesome. not my thing. the retail industry got a wake-up call earlier this year when tjx, parent company of t.j. maxx and marshall's disclosed that it had suffered the worst high-tech heist in shopping history. >> beginning in 2006, there was a series of high-profile data

breaches that were reported to the department of justice, and we started linking those attacks to different individuals and criminal groups. and a central figure for all of those breaches was albert gonzalez. >> and so on may 7th, 2008, albert gonzalez and four co-conspirators were arrested. >> albert gonzalez is awaiting trial on allegations he orchestrated the largest data breach in history. he and his accomplices are accused of acquiring 130 million credit and debit card numbers from five large companies. >> when we arrested him, we found him with a bmw, a jet ski and rolex watches. he was spending some time in luxury apartments and had an $80,000 birthday party in a nice hotel in new york. >> and the secret service dug up $1.4 million in his parents' yard. >> it was the proceeds of his crime. >> hacking was like a sport to

him. he was addicted, and he couldn't stop. in 2009, albert gonzalez pled guilty to multiple counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, computer fraud, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft as related to numerous hacks and intrusions. >> he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, which at that time was a massive sentence. i think it was a just sentence. it sent the message to the criminal world that this is now being taken very seriously and was proportionate to the amount of criminal activity he was convicted for. >> i felt betrayed because it was personal to me. there were phases of the personal relationship that we went through, drugs and withdrawal and getting him through that, building up that

trust and then getting to the point where you're ecstatic over a huge investigation that had never been done before, that he was partly responsible for. i felt we had turned him around. but for me it was how much of it was a lie. especially because the career that i have now, every day i have to think about the fact that he helped me get here. it pisses me off. but no matter what happened with albert at the end doesn't take away from everything that was done and accomplished by all the men and women of the secret service. >> operation firewall was the largest international takedown that the secret service had ever undertaken. it was also the first time it had done a lot of things it had never done in the

investigative -- >> i did not really realize the impact of operation firewall until much later. the secret service still uses a lot of the same investigative tactics that were learned in firewall. >> this case is really about the transformation of physical crime to online crime and the way law enforcement and intelligence has to adapt to that transformation. >> in the age of, hackers are becoming the most dangerous criminals in the world. >> credit bureau equifax hacked and the information of 140 million americans breached. >> you look at how many people have had their identity stolen now, it's close to the entire population of the u.s. has been compromised in some way or another. >> hack organizations are now state-sponsored or terrorism-related. >> whatever technology we have, criminals have access to as well. they're learning. they're advancing their techniques. but law enforcement is also learning and advancing its

techniques. >> now we're seeing the evolution of your information becoming power and how it gets used against you. it's a new world. hello and welcome to our viewers here in the united states and of course all around the world. you are watching "cnn newsroom," and i'm rosemary church. dangerous escalation in hong kong. protesters at a university are using makeshift weapons to fight off riot police who are trying to clear out the campus. a critical week in the impeachment inquiry. witnesses coming forward include a trump administration official who has given conflicting accounts of the ukraine scandal. plus prince andrew's decision to sit down for an interview. why critics say it was a p.r. nightmare.