[Encosia]

To me, it's not a question of black/gray/white hat. This was as much a "hack" as grabbing a handful of business cards out of the free-lunch-for-your-office drawing bowl at Chipotle. Regardless of what nefarious purposes someone had for snatching those business cards, almost everyone would see it as ludicrous to suggest a 10 year sentence for the act of grabbing that unguarded data alone.

Even though this guy is no role model, it makes me deeply uneasy to see AT&T get away so easily with reframing their own incompetence as innocent victimization.