[IanCal]

As is often the case, and is often ignored, the key is intent.

There is a difference between:

    You: Can you give me the email address of user 50?
    Librarian: Sure, here you go

    Librarian: Oh balls, I wasn't supposed to hand that over, that could have been anyone!

And

    You: Can you give me the email address of user 50?
    Librarian: Sure, here you go
    You: Hmm

    You-irc: Hey guise! The librarian is giving out everyones email addresses, this is totally breaking privacy laws right? 
    You-irc: lols, I'm going to get all of them! This could be used for a massive phishing operation
    You-irc: or even make their stock price drop, we could short it

    You: Hey librarian, can you give me the email address of user 51?
    Librarian: Sure, here you go
    You: Hey librarian, can you give me the email address of user 52?
    Librarian: Sure, here you go
    You: Hey librarian, can you give me the email address of user 53?
    Librarian: Sure, here you go
    ...
    You: Hey librarian, can you give me the email address of user 1023821?
    Librarian: Sure, here you go

He didn't grab one or two, then send the information to AT&T to get them to fix it. He deliberately collected a significant amount of data he knew was personal information and gave it to someone else. That alone would be enough. If he just wanted to verify that the attack worked, get the code of someone else who gives you permission, show that they can be easily generated and you're done. You don't need more than a few to prove the point.

The service was clearly not intended to be a directory of email addresses for people to use. It was clearly there to return the email address to the user of the iPad with that ICC-IDC code (which, unlike my example, aren't obviously guessable)

I'm not going to say anything about the sentence, but I do think he was guilty.

[at-fates-hands]

This is the issue I have with all of this. Everybody is defending HOW he did what he did with no thought as to WHAT he actually did - as if it shouldn't matter.

He knew what he was doing was illegal and didn't care, he got caught and tried to justify his actions by blaming AT&T for having a faulty configured server.

Not good enough for me and the jury agreed.

[victorf]

How he did it absolutely does matter. He did not know what he was doing was illegal because that is the expected interaction with an HTTP server. He certainly knew it was immoral but we give Wall Street a pass on that.

Suppose I write a scraper with user agent "I am a teapot" and I discover AT&T emits personal data when I access with that user agent. What is the arbitrary cutoff for number of things downloaded before I am a criminal?

There are in fact actual criminal charges that can be brought for identity theft, we don't need the US courts to be more aggressive with the CFAA by considering thoughtcrime in their deliberations.