Former Reuters Journalist Matthew Keys Sentenced to Two Years for Hacking

mercredi 13 avril 2016

On Wednesday, the infamous former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys was sentenced to two years in prison for computer hacking.

Keys, who once worked for Tribune Company-owned Sacramento television station Fox 40, left that job in 2010 and went on to copy and paste login credentials for the Tribune Company’s Content Management System (CMS) into a chatroom where members of the hacking collective Anonymous planned out their operations. (Keys still denies all allegations.)

An unknown person under the username “sharpie” then went on to log into the CMS and deface a Los Angeles Times article. The article’s headline and dek (the subtitle beneath the headline) remained defaced for about forty minutes before an editor noticed and changed it back.

From the defense’s opening arguments.

In October 2015, a jury found Keys guilty of three counts of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a conviction that carried with it a maximum sentence of 25 years. A presentence report prepared by the probation office recommended 87 months (about seven years). The US Attorney’s Office ended up seeking a lower sentence of five years.

Keys’s attorneys asked for probation instead, claiming that the defacement did not result in enough loss to the Tribune Company to warrant any prison time. Their contention goes to one of the most controversial aspects of the case. In order to be convicted of felony under the particular provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which prosecutors used to charge Keys, the conduct must exceed a threshold of $5,000.

But the evidence brought at trial with respect to the total loss—and which was likely cited in the sealed presentence report prepared by the probation office—is tied to the Tribune Company’s reaction in the wake of the hack, including an extensive assessment of the entire CMS, as well as emails, phone calls, and meetings made by both journalists and highly-paid executives.

“A sentence of five years imprisonment reflects Keys’s culpability and places his case appropriately among those of other white collar criminals who do not accept responsibility for their crimes,” prosecutors said in their sentencing recommendation.

Keys has said that he was targeted for his work as a journalist, and that the prosecution was politically motivated. In the sentencing recommendation, prosecutors denied this, stating outright, “Keys was not targeted because he was a journalist.”

The story that the prosecution told at trial was not of a one-off, regretful copy/paste into a chatroom, but rather of a weeks-long harassment campaign launched at a former employer. In a taped confession, the validity of which Keys contests, Keys admitted to sending a series of harassing emails under various pseudonyms taken from the TV show The X-Files. Pseudonymous emails were also were sent to viewers who had signed up for emails from the television station—some of whom were elderly, and reacted very poorly. Only later did he contact Anonymous.

The sentencing recommendation memo suggests that if anything, both the prosecution and the ultimate recommended sentence were at least partly spurred on by how little Keys endeared himself to law enforcement. “Keys’s characteristics include narcissism and an arrogant indifference to the suffering of innocent and vulnerable people,” prosecutors wrote in the memorandum.

Prosecutors also said that a five-year sentence was justified by how “Keys lies and promotes cynicism about the justice system,” pointing out numerous statements that Keys had made on Twitter and to news outlets after the verdict.