Also don't forget that Weev was considering selling the info he got, before he decided to be lazy and just tell the world. So not only is he a massive troll, but his motives for the "hack" were also less than saintly.
Also, how is it lazy to create a media shitstorm and get your house raided versus making some free money quickly and quietly? Are you really trying to frame his turning down free money as the MORE disdainful choice?!
We don't criminalize daydreams. And I'm not suggesting that we should.
However, we do take motivation into account with a great many crimes. For example, if you kill someone, your intentions, and how long you've had them, affect whether you get charged with manslaughter or murders 1 through 3.
He does not say that he is going to sell stolen information.
He does remark on irc that the information is valuable and could be sold or used for a phishing operation, but that is an observation of reality, and can not be taken as a statement of intent without some other evidence showing that he was likely to pursue that course of action, and given that he then handed the list to gawker it would seem that this was not his intent, though the possibility had obviously crossed his mind.
To consider the possibility of indulging in criminal behaviour is not the same as planning to do so.
If that were the case then any number of "spy thriller" type authors would be potentially guilty of conspiracy for publishing their "daydreams".
weev fucked up - and he _knew_ he was "fucking up" when he went from "finding a vulnerability" to "automatically exploiting that vulnerability to collect as much data as he could". Felten, Blaze, Schneier, Kaminsky - they would all have tried incrementing the get parameter - when it worked they would all have tried a bunch more times to confirm their assumptions, none of them would expect to get away with subsequent wholesale download of AT&T's customer data. Neither should weev.
I'm not suggesting weev was after credit cards or intending to commit fraud. But I stand by me second para - that Kaminsky or Blaze wouldn't have downloaded the entire database after confirming the vulnerability works - and weev should have known he was "doing something wrong" when he chose to. I agree that AT&T (and the prosecutors here) are _seriously_ overreacting, but weev was a fool if he didn't expect _any_ adverse reaction.
This stinks to me of AT&T and their legal team trying to make them look like "the victim" - where in truth their subscribers are he aggrieved parties here and AT&T are as much in the wrong from he subscribers point of view as weev is.
If the man is actually guilty of a crime, convict him of that crime. If not, don't.
What you're saying is that we should convict innocent people of crimes they haven't committed because we don't like them. Do you not see the problem with that?