The 29-year old journalist sat outside at a Boudin eatery on a recent day, reading various news stories on his notebook. Keys, who’s now unemployed, most recently held work at Grasswire after neglecting to secure new investment before the firm terminated all of its own workers that were paid in January 2016. Keys has continued to interview for other journalism occupations.

Several months after being convicted of national hacking charges, Keys is set to be sentenced in federal court in Sacramento. Keys stated the hacking conviction had “destroyed his reputation.”

Keys was convicted after a jury trial on three counts of conspiracy and criminal hacking. Since that time, prosecutors have requested the judge to impose a term of five years, while his own attorneys have asked for no prison time. Keys continues to claim that it is a clear case of prosecutorial overreach. He also denies the activities that he has vowed to appeal the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a procedure that probably will continue a year or more and was accused of.

Either way, on Wednesday, US District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller will declare her sentencing determination in her court in Sacramento.
Keys sees himself as a casualty more than five years subsequent to the alleged offense happened: a journalist that is upstanding standing up against what he views as overzealous prosecution of computer crime that is comparatively small. He continues to maintain that he is being punished by the FBI for his journalistic work of investigating the Unattributable collective and for not working with the FBI when he was contacted by them in April 2011.

Keys said that he was given plea deals, which he turned down, lest he be made to confess to a crime he claims he did’t perpetrate to three. (Two sets of what look internal FBI files, for example, plea deals, an audio recording, and handwritten FBI notes associated with Keys were leaked to the web site Cryptome.org.

“I ‘d expect by means of this encounter, there are folks who are out there that look at this and go: ‘You understand what, this is bullshit. It’s bullshit they do it constantly and the government is invoking national security and terrorism laws, and they’re doing it here. Where’s the underside?’”

Matthew Keys could face up to 25 years in prison after supposedly giving up login to CMS.
As it is told by the government in court filings, in October 2010, Keys was fired from his job as a web-based news producer at KTXL Fox 40. (Keys says he stepped down from Fox 40 before he was fired. He afterwards worked at Reuters and at Grasswire.) The Chicago-based company owns the Los Angeles Times, among other media properties.
By December 2010, lots of emails were sent to Fox 40 from various @yahoo.co.uk email accounts that bore the names of X Files characters, including Fox Mulder and Walter Skinner. These emails taunted Fox 40 for its lax security and promised to have taken quite a few Fox 40 viewers’ e-mail addresses from a business advertising database, criticized the firm, and then contacted a few of these audience directly.

The body of the story was unaffected. After 40 minutes, the Times’ IT staff revoked the permissions, edits were rescinded, along with the defacement stopped.