Matthew Keys Might Be Forced to Pay Tronc $249,956

Journalist Matthew Keys might be on the hook for $249,956 in restitution to his one-time employer Tribune Company (now known as Tronc).

After leaving Tribune-owned Sacramento television station KTXL Fox 40 in 2010, Keys pasted user credentials to the Tribune content management system (CMS) into an Anonymous chatroom, enabling an unknown person under the handle "sharpie" to deface a LA Times article about tax cuts. The defacement lasted about 40 minutes.

Keys was convicted of hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in October 2015. In April he was sentenced to two years in prison—a sentence that his lawyers are asking to have suspended pending an appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

At trial, prosecutors said that the defacement had been just one part of a much longer campaign of harassment directed at Tribune Company, one that included threatening emails (from pseudonyms taken from various X-Files characters) sent to both staffers and to a mailing list of viewers. (Keys denies all allegations, and says that a taped confession to an FBI agent was recorded while he was on sleep medication.)

At a hearing on Wednesday, prosecutor Matthew Segal told Judge Kimberly Mueller that the pre-sentencing report prepared by the probation office—which recommends a penalty of $249,956 in restitution—had relied on uncontested evidence. "Restitution matters are typically decided by victims' estimates," he said in court.

Keys's lawyers argued that the numbers submitted by the Tribune Company—and relied on by the probation office—simply didn't add up. For example, part of the Tribune Company's damage estimates come from calculating the value of time spent on various emails, phone calls, and meetings between journalists, managers, and executives. The time estimated is in increments of half hours.

"If I'm on a phone call for five minutes, I don't bill for half an hour," said defense attorney Jay Leiderman. "That's unconscionable." He pointed out that at least one of the emails was only two lines long.

On top of that, Leiderman said that the value placed on employees' time didn't add up either.

Although the Tribune Company (now Tronc) estimated the value of senior executives' time at $500 an hour, Leiderman pointed out that the witness who had received the highest salary while at the Tribune Company was Jerry Delcore, who testified that he was paid $350,000. However, at $500 an hour, he would be making about a million dollars.

Leiderman also pointed out that staffer Samantha Cohen, who is supposedly worth $50 an hour, should, by those estimates, be making $100,000, when in fact she testified that she made $46,000. "That was memorable because she was the only female in this case, and her salary was so grotesquely low," said Leiderman.

Although the Tribune Company, at one point, estimated damages at $929,977, the probation office was much more restrained in its estimates. For example, the office held back from including a $409,612 loss from a ratings decline that the Tribune company blamed on Matthew Keys.

However, the probation office did include the $200,000 that the Tribune Company says it cost to "rebuild" a database of Fox 40 viewers after Keys sent out a mass email (from an X-files character) claiming that the television station's iPad giveaway was a scam.

No decision has yet been made on how much restitution Keys will ultimately have to pay. Keys has been ordered to surrender to a federal prison in Lompoc, California this summer. His attorneys have filed a motion for continued release while his appeal is pending.