The jury of 11 women and one man also heard a recording of Keys admitting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he gave Tribune login credentials to a hacker from the group Anonymous.
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The hackers used the details provided by Mr. Keys to log on the Tribune Media CMS and change the title of a Los Angeles Times article.
Keys was a disgruntled ex-social media editor of a Sacramento station, Fox 40, who wanted to harm his former employer, according to prosecutors. But the prosecution claimed the damage cost the Tribune Company $5,000 to rectify, a figure that Keys’ lawyers attacked as being unreasonably high, and inflated specifically by the use of expensive consultants so the case could be tried under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (which requires the case to be involving more than $5,000 as a jurisdictional minimum).
Keys was indicted in 2013, at which point he was working as a social media editor at Reuters.
His attorneys contended any adjustment was a relatively harmless prank that did not merit charges carrying a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in federal prison.
In any case, Keys was back on Twitter today retweeting all the tweets that have come to his defense, including one from Edward Snowden.
Prosecutors said Keys’ actions were “anonymous revenge”.
Keys’ attorney, Jay Leiderman, says he’ll appeal Wednesday’s verdict and is among many questioning the possible severity of the sentence. The information allowed the group to access the web publishing platform of the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune publication. “With love and respect, [The L.A. Times’] story was defaced for 40 minutes when someone found it and fixed it in three minutes”. In a post-conviction interview Keys stated that he felt that he was made an example of because of a separate probe in which he refused to cooperate with investigators and that he had published a story citing unnamed sources, which he refused to reveal.
“I think it’s hypocritical that the Department of Justice just a few months ago asked for the ability to hack into anybody’s computer”, Keys said Wednesday.
The defacement was “live” on the LA Times site for about an hour, the defence said.
“The CFAA is one of the laws that is misused by prosecutors, piling on potential jail time to relatively minor charges in order to ratchet up pressure on defendants and get them to plead guilty rather than risk trial”, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, billed as the “the leading nonprofit organisation defending civil liberties in the digital world”, wrote earlier this year.
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“It’s bullshit”, Keys said, reacting to the judgment, according to The Huffington Post.
