Earlier today, a Sacramento jury found former Reuters social media manager Matthew Keys guilty on three counts of computer hacking.
The charges related to a 2010 incident, where Keys posted login credentials to the content management of the Tribune Company to an Anonymous chatroom. The Tribune Company owned properties including the LA Times, which was subsequently vandalised.
The prosecutors claimed that by Keys handing the logins over to a group of notorious hackers — and, according to the earlier charges, encouraging them to ‘fuck shit up’ — he was conspiring to hack, as well as transmitting ‘malicious code’ over the internet.
Keys has painted the case as a ‘journalist vs the government’ struggle, but the jury came down in favour of the government. The statuatory minimum for Keys’s three crimes is 25 years, but according to a report on Motherboard, the prosecutors will likely ask for “less than five years”. As a government spokesperson said: it’s not exactly the crime of the century.