I sincerely hope Keys gets nothing more than probation. Mostly because this is the government's chance to make up for their colossal fuck up over Aaron Swartz. And because incarcerating Keys has so little value; he seems to have learned his lesson and in the time since his indictment has continued to do good journalism work, even landing new jobs.

But if you believe the government's narrative isn't totally hocus pocus, that the IRC logs truly depict what they seem to, that Keys maintained the identity of "AESCracked" throughout the period of his alleged hacking...then to portray his actions as just helping to change a story's headline for the lulz is plain dishonest.

Read the search warrant yourself [1], starting with page 39.

He not only gives his credentials over; in the conversation, he talks about creating new accounts for hackers to use (yes, apparently an average web producer -- even after being fired -- has superuser privileges on the Tribune CMS). He then walks the other IRC users through how to navigate the CMS. He doesn't just encourage them to "go fuck some shit up!" on the LA Times, he then proceeds to enumerate every news site owned by Tribune, with particular instruction on which places should be hit for being "tribune's bread and butter assets".

What really irks me is that hackers, page 47, then talk about rooting the Tribune server to gain access to to emails and everything else. And "AESCracked" is just sitting there, goading them along, giving them more information completely unprompted. It's hard for me to believe that any reporter who knows what "root access" means can say with a straight face that Keys is only guilty of a prank, that the possibility of an entire news organization's data -- including every reporter's email -- being captured and dumped like HBGary or Ashley Madison or Sony, is just no big deal.

So why didn't that happen? Who knows -- but the fact that a company who granted superuser access to all web producers to their non-https publicly-exposed CMS, and had no process for revoking credentials, and did nothing even after noticing said superuser account was creating new unauthorized accounts -- managed to not get rooted after said credentials were given over is a bonafide Christmas miracle. One of the other IRC users (sharpie) decided on his/her own to fuck around with the LA Times in a way that was immediately obvious to the Tribune sysops, who then removed user privileges.

Giving out superuser credentials to a hacker's group causes $0 worth of damage. Creating new user accounts (including another super user account) causes $0 of damage. Giving out every URL to the different CMSes, including the user manual about how to navigate their interfaces causes $0 of damage. Sure, it adds up to less than $5,000 of damage if you believe bits are just nothing but electronic blips. But let's not be dishonest and say that this was just a good ol' fun prank like the time when Woz programmed the campus computer system to bulk print "FUCK NIXON" [2]

But yeah, the truth is that no real damage was caused despite the potential -- the $900K+ of damages cited was the money spent by Tribune to overhaul their system, including making CMS login URLs https. And hopefully, a better access-control system...and frankly, I'm OK with that kind of technicality allowing Keys to just get probation. Worser criminals have gotten acquitted for lesser reasons. But I don't feel it's right to gloss over his crime. IMO, what he did was not just less admirable than what Snowden and Aaron Swartz did, but more sociopathic than what weev was imprisoned for. According to the IRC transcript, Keys had no problem abetting a chatroom full of hackers with completely fucking his colleagues -- and any and all confidential sources for any ongoing journalism investigations.

On a lighter note, page 46 of the search warrant is fun reading and I think sheds light on why the Tribune company didn't get completely owned. The hackers invite Keys to paste all the user credentials to their private hackerpad, and after doing so, Keys asks, "what's the govt passwords for? what lulz will be unleashed soon? or is that for me to not know? :p"...the responses in the IRC from the hackers after they realize what they've just let slip to a total stranger are just pure comedy.

[1] http://www.laweekly.com/news/matthew-keys-helped-anonymous-h...

[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=Yd2Hm8BlzZUC&pg=PA162&lpg=...