Matthew Keys, deputy social media editor at Reuters, has been indicted by the federal government for conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to access the Los Angeles Times website in December 2010. He faces up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines if convicted.
Keys, a former Tribune Co. employee, allegedly gave hackers login information for the Tribune’s content management system and told a hacker in explicit terms to do some damage. A Gawker story from 2011 said Keys had “infiltrated” Anonymous,* but it’s unclear whether Keys knew the Justice Department was going to pursue charges against him. An active tweeter, Keys sent a casual Twitter message out 20 minutes before Politico’s Dylan Byers and Josh Gerstein broke the news.
BuzzFeed has a good round-up of the primary documents involved in the case, and you can read the original court documents here, uploaded by the Huffington Post. The Times Company and Reuters have not yet issued a comment about the situation, but one Reuters technology reporter tweeted, then deleted, a message reading “oh jesus” shortly after the news broke.
*Correction, March 14, 2013: This post originally said Gawker “outed” Keys’ involvement with Anonymous, but the story only said Keys had “infiltrated” the group.
