Accused Reuters Editor Suspended, Still Tweeting
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Mashable
A day after a federal indictment accused him of helping hacktivist group Anonymous deface news websites, Matthew Keys has been suspended by Reuters, the company announced Friday.
Keys, the deputy editor of social media for Reuters, was charged Thursday for allegedly giving members of Anonymous password access to a Tribune Company server in 2010. Keys had recently lost his job as a Fox 40 web producer, a local TV station part of the Tribune group.
According to the indictment, he gave the hackers his credentials and told them to “go fuck some shit up.” Using his login and password, they went on to deface a story on the Los Angeles Times website.
Reuters announced his suspension with pay to several media outlets Friday. Previous reports claimed his workstation was being dismantled and his security pass to access the Thomson Reuters building in Times Square was revoked.
Meanwhile, Keys has remained active on Twitter, where he has a considerable following (TIME magazine named his feed one the best of 2012). Today, he confirmed that Jay Leiderman and Tor Ekeland will be his lawyers.
Keys, as well as the lawyers themselves, announced the news on Twitter.
Leiderman and Ekeland are experts in computer crime, and have represented defendants in hacking cases before. Ekeland is the counsel for Andrew Auernheimer — also known as the iPad hacker — who will be sentenced on Monday for accessing an AT&T server that stored details on iPad customers, then passing that information to Gawker.
The Department of Justice alleges Keys conspired with Anonymous in the hack of the Tribune Company’s websites between December 10 and 15, 2010. Keys himself had written about his conversations with the hackers, including Hector Xavier Monsegur, also known as Sabu.
Monsegur was one of the most visible members of Anonymous at the time. After Keys wrote about the group and sent chat logs to Gawker, he pointed the finger at Keys in a tweet. Monsegur claimed Keys “gave full control of LATimes.com to hackers.”
Since then, Sabu has become an informant for the FBI, helping the feds arrest several alleged members of Anonymous.
Meanwhile, some observers have linked Keys’ case to that of Aaron Swartz, hinting that this could be another example of prosecutorial overreach in cyber crime. “The Matthew Keys Case Shows Just How Big a Bully the Feds Can Be,” was the title of a story on The Atlantic Wire Friday.
“Have only skimmed Keys indictment thus far but I’m not optimistic this will be an example of a measured and reasonable CFAA prosecution,” tweeted Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group wrote in a blog post that “this case underscores how computer crimes are prosecuted much more harshly than analogous crimes in the physical world.”
Chris Soghoian, a technologist and advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Fordham Law School on February 20 that because of “fearful” prosecutors, judges and juries, “we end up in a situation where society at large is scared of the potential of these hackers. They don’t understand what we’re capable or why we do what we do.”
Keys could spend 25 years in jail and faces up to $750,000 in fines. He will be arraigned on April 12 in Sacramento.
Image via Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images
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