Fired Reuters editor pleads not guilty to aiding hackers

Keys, 26, said on Monday he had been fired and Thomson Reuters confirmed he no longer works at the company. The alleged offences occurred before he joined Reuters in January 2012 in a job that involved posting news from Reuters and other sources on both company Twitter feeds and other means, including his own Twitter account.

Reuters suspended him with pay after last month’s indictment and his access to his Reuters e-mail account was cut off. He continued to tweet from a personal account and identified himself as an editor at Reuters.

In a blog post on Monday Keys wrote that his coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing last week – such as tweeting information from police radio scanners that turned out to be incorrect – was one of the reasons he was given for his termination. He has changed his profile description to “Former Deputy Social Media Editor at @Reuters”.

Keys was indicted in March by a federal grand jury in Sacramento on three criminal counts alleging he entered an Internet chatroom used by members of the hacking collective Anonymous and helped hackers gain access to the computer system of Tribune Co. in December 2010. A story on Tribune’s Los Angeles Times website was altered by one of those hackers, the indictment said.

Keys was silent during the hearing in federal district court in Sacramento as his lawyer entered the plea. A status conference was set for June 12. The maximum for conviction on all three counts would be 25 years in prison, although actual sentences handed down by judges are often far less than the maximum. ■