My bias comment about the original article was mostly from them calling the guys "trolls" along with some other things that seemed to have a certain tone. But after rereading it, most of the article is indirectly attributed to "Prosecutors" and "the government" so I will concede that the article may not be "biased" per se. But I maintain that there is more to the story than they reported. And since you are determined to make me Google this all again and point you to specific articles & "evidence" here goes...

http://gawker.com/5559346/apples-worst-security-breach-11400... :

Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T's website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/14/were-awarding-goatse-securi... :

AT&T said: ...wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad – called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID) – and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address.

http://gawker.com/5559725/att-fights-spreading-ipad-fear :

AT&T said: The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

http://gizmodo.com/5559586/should-i-worry-about-the-apple-ip... :

The exploit was a simple script: a hacker could throw an ICC-ID at AT&T's servers, and they would return its registered email address. ICC-ID are easily guessable,...

http://security.goatse.fr/on-disclosure-ethics :

We did not contact AT&T directly, but we made sure that someone else tipped them off and waited for them to patch until we gave anything to Gawker.

None of us made any money off of this disclosure. We did it in public interests.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/01/18/fbis-le... :

federal agent Christian Schorle does his best to dig up evidence that Auernheimer is less of an advocate for security and more of a full-fledged Internet miscreant.

All of these things help shape my opinion on the matter:

1) I don't believe the data harvested is that significant. Having a list of email address these days is practically worthless and pretty easy to get. Having an email address matched to an iPad ID number might be a little more useful to someone, but I fail to see how beyond some better targeted SPAM. I was not able to find any articles about that leaked info being to blame for any other iPad/AT&T breaches but I didn't look very hard.

2) I don't believe that any security systems were circumvented to obtain the data. It seems to me that a wget or cURL call on a loop would have done 75% of the work. Calling this a "hack" is kind of an insult to people who actually do hack into secure systems. It is barely even "brute force", if at all. I would put this in the "automated scraping" bucket.

3) I don't believe he committed a crime here. Sure, the guys seems like a bit of a crusty wild man and possibly a bit of a douche. But thanks be to the Earth & Stars that neither of those things are felonies. Unfortunately, it seems they had already determined this guy was bad. And when you start a search with your mind already made up about the results, you are almost always going to end up at that result... no matter if it is wrong or right.