He literally asked the web server "can I have these files" and it responded with "yes, you are authorized, here you go".
If he wasn't authorized, the server should have responded with a 403 Forbidden!
Web servers are built around authentication and access rights! It is not the teen's fault that the government doesn't know how to configure them properly.
Edit: after few days you realize that the trash on your curb shouldn't have been there. Then you raid the trash company because your brother is a cop.
Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.
This is a non-sequitur, nobody is saying anything about anyone's property rights being revoked.
The teen asked for access, and the content owners, via the permissions they had configured, granted it. Sure they can later decide that this was a mistake, but that doesn't make it theft for the teen to have asked for access.
They made a mistake when configuring their web server. It's obvious that this was a mistake because some of the documents contained private information from Canadian citizens.
Per the tech article, it was an open archive of public documents that the government published periodically. The reasonable assumption is that the files were all public, and there's no reason to suspect the teenager in this case thought otherwise. The fact that ~3% of the files weren't properly redacted (whatever that means) is hardly "obvious".
> Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.
Let's keep things constructive please.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about physical property in the real world or virtual property on a server.
Leaving your property on the curb is a good example. If someone takes it, you would be hard pressed to get it back from a legal standpoint.
This is very similar. The government left all those documents on the curb.