On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice announced it had indicted Matthew Keys, the deputy social-media editor at Reuters, on one count of conspiracy and two counts of computer fraud. Keys allegedly helped members of the hacker collective Anonymous access the back end of the Los Angeles Times’ Web site in 2010 and change the content of one of its news stories. Though the damage done was minimal, the consequences for Keys may be severe. The three counts with which he was charged carry a maximum combined penalty of 25 years in prison.
Keys is being charged under the general federal conspiracy statute and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the same act under which Aaron Swartz was charged. And as far as I can tell, just like with the Swartz case, the feds are going to use the threat of a huge maximum sentence to intimidate Keys into accepting a plea bargain.
“It was part of the conspiracy to alter the online version of a news feature published on the Web site of The Los Angeles Times,” the indictment alleges, and the “conspiracy” was successful, I guess. A single Los Angeles Times news story was altered to display humorously false content (“Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337”) for, like, 30 minutes. That’s it.
The trouble with our current computer laws is that they are so ridiculously vague that they can be used to justify garbage charges like these. When the CFAA was passed in 1984, most of the world wasn’t networked, and the law was meant to prosecute sophisticated, malicious hackers who targeted government computers or the financial system. Now the entire world is networked, but the CFAA still reads as if universities and the Department of Defense are the only institutions with Internet access. Why hasn’t the law been changed to sufficiently reflect the times? I suspect the CFAA has been left intentionally vague so that prosecutors can use it as a bludgeon — a catch-all statute that amps up prison time and frightens suspects into plea bargaining.
The government wants Anonymous pretty badly, but I’m not sure what its actual game is here. Is it trying to make an example out of Keys so that other people will think twice before cooperating with Anonymous? Or is it simply being disproportionate and unreasonable out of habit? Apparently, it didn’t take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case. — Slate