That's why they've been charged with "Conspiracy", isn't it? The elements of federal Conspiracy:

(1) An agreement between two or more persons to commit at least one crime.

(2) A person joining the conspiracy knowing of at least one of its objects and intending to help accomplish it.

(3) One of the members of the conspiracy performed at least one overt act for the purpose of carrying out the conspiracy.

So, here:

1. Let's build a database of stolen AT&T email addresses associated with iPads and then sell them to spammers.

2. Here, run this script as I adjust to to increase the number of accounts it successfully finds.

3. Oh, look, I ran this script and got 100,000 email addresses.

Not good, right?

Look, if you read Spitler's indictment, it really doesn't seem like this particular conspiracy wanted to do anything but troll a huge company with thousands of people's personal information. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the defendants here, but it does seem like an injustice that could have been addressed in civil court.

It seems like a stretch to convince a jury that these people really wanted to sell the information they collected.

On the other hand, I think the idea that AT&T made this information available to the public in such a manner that you could have in good faith harvested hundreds of thousands of addresses is pretty much bunk. It's not going to help that A.A.'s first instinct was to run to the media because simply having the addresses was such a big story that they'd be on the front page of NEWS.GOOGLE.COM. He more or less immediately made clear to everyone that he knew he had no business handling that data.

It's debatable whether or not they did the right thing. Many security researchers would say that the right thing would have been telling AT&T first, giving AT&T a reasonable amount of time to respond, and only then going to the media.

This also speaks to motives. At the end of the day, I don't really care whether or not weev is a good guy. I do think it's important to be really clear about why he does the things he does, because otherwise you're not having the real conversation. IMHO, it's more important to protect jerks than it is to protect nice guys. It's harder to protect jerks.

Therefore, you're doing the community a disservice if you paint weev as an angel. Let him be who he is. Then defend him if his case merits it.

Tangentially, "many greyhat researchers don't have those ethics or morals" is irrelevant. The question at hand is whether or not weev acted morally, not whether or not he did better than average.

I don't see 'sneak doing anything but saying that A.A. was hit very hard by the Justice Department, and that he deserves the best possible defense and, in the meantime, the least possible disruption to his life. I wouldn't have coughed up bail money, but I admire the hell out of 'sneak for doing that.

He did also claim that weev did the Right Thing. I don't think that assertion is clearly accurate.

It's entirely possible that I'm focusing too much on motive; possibly the end effect (hole fixed) matters more than why weev did it in the first place.