Why not? It's a publicly available link.
Do you not see a difference between published newspaper articles and AT&T's customers' private information, however poorly guarded? Do you think a judge would? Maybe freehunter didn't see the difference either and I'm just a cynic.
As for what a judge would think, the fact that you had to find a way around their content protection gave a clear sign that they were trying to protect their content. The DMCA doesn't really discriminate when it comes to the difficulty of copyright circumvention.
As to the actual point, WSJ has a paywall in place which they deliberately open to let Google through. Not just Google's crawler, but visitors using Google's search page as a referrer.
It's quite different than AT&T being incompetent or negligent with their customers' private info. WSJ is the owner of the content and they are making a strategic decision to allow this behavior.
Again, I wish I hadn't been rude. It would have been nicer to have this exchange without it.