Feds snag another ‘hacker’ while ignoring actual criminals

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Federal prosecutors go medieval on a “hacker” for committing an extremely minor offense while letting megacorps and actual cyber terrorists pretty much do as they please.

Matthew Keys, a now-former employee of Reuters, has been charged with helping Anonymous hack the L.A. Times website in December 2010 by providing members of the hacktivista group the log-in credentials to his former employer, the Tribune Company, and encouraging them to “go f*** some s*** up.”

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Keys had been Web editor at the Tribune Company, which publishes the Times, so he had the keys to the site’s CMS. Anonymous proceeded to log in and change the headline for one Times story. The headline was hacked to read “Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337” and bylined “CHIPPYS NO 1 FAN.”

Total time the site was under Anonymous’s control: less than 30 minutes

Keys’ potential jail time: 25 years and a $750,000 fine.

Can it get more absurd than that? I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.

Apparently, Keys intended to report on his insider experience with Anonymous as a journalist. He wrote a story about hackers for Reuters last March that used some of his IRC conversations with them. Granted, it was stupid of him to provide the Tribune log-in info to the Anons; it’s a little like giving a burglar the key to your boss’s front door so that you can report on how the cops investigate crime. If he’d received any kind of formal journalism training (besides an associates’ degree from a college you probably haven’t heard of), he might have realized that.

Clearly the Aaron Swartz suicide did nothing to dampen the DOJ’s taste for finding an easy example to show how tough it’s being on cyber crime, while simultaneously attempting to hide how pathetic it is at prosecuting and preventing actual crime. In other words, we can’t actually catch Russian scammers or Chinese spies or Iranian saboteurs, so we’re going to divert attention from that by throwing the book at some shaggy-haired Internet stooge for reckless Internet Relay Chatting.

It’s hard to write about this topic without sounding like a nutloaf who spends too much time listening to the Alex Jones radio show. But if you pull back a bit and look at the bigger picture of what’s happening here, it’s hard not to be concerned.

In a speech earlier this month, President Obama declared that “the cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” In Senate hearings this week, FBI director Robert Mueller said cyber security ranks “right up there” with terrorism.

In other words, the war on cyber crime is about to supplant the war on terror, which of course replaced the war on drugs, which was a temporary fill-in until we could find a better replacement for the war on communism. I’m feeling an overwhelming urge to quote Orwell here, but I’ll try to restrain myself.

The war on cyber crime will also provide extremely convenient cover for our government’s desire to employ all these wonderful tech toys we use each day for surveillance purposes, as well as unleash an army of domestic drones. And it comes just in time for our Congress to take up the latest version of CISPA. What a coincidence, eh?

I’m not saying cyber terrorism isn’t real. The United States knows this better than anyone. It was us, after all, who created malware to throw a monkey wrench into Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Bad actors abound, whether they’re Chinese army hackers attempting industrial espionage or the Russian mob selling botnets at wholesale prices.

The bad guys want to blow up our buildings and burn down our houses. I get that. But instead of spending all our limited resources going after them, we’re prosecuting the ones who try to spray paint graffiti on the walls — just to prove how tough we are.

People like Matt Keys — really, anyone involved with Anonymous — aren’t the threat. They aren’t even a reasonable facsimile of the threat. Why are we wasting tax dollars persecuting them?

Is pursuing people like Matt Keys a stupid waste of our resources or a necessary deterrent? Share your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Feds snag another ‘hacker’ while ignoring actual criminals,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.