Whether they've stated it publicly or not, I would imagine AT&T's main contention with weev is that he released the information publicly (to Gawker) without attempting to disclose the information to them first (please correct me if he did and I've overlooked that). Nonetheless, if he were to have gone to AT&T first I don't think there's anything that could have stopped AT&T from accusing him of hacking and pressing charges anyway since that wouldn't have changed the way he went about discovering the issue. That's scary. Even this particular case aside, how is a person supposed to ethically disclose an exploit to an organization without fear of prosecution?