> information he had no reasonable grounds to believe he was authorized to access because he deliberately decoded some Base64-encoded strings that the reporter

> information he had no reasonable grounds to believe he was authorized to access because he deliberately decoded some Base64-encoded strings that the reporter expected to contain sensitive information From a mathematical or CS perspective, i.e. from the perspective of objectivity and rigor, the Base64-encoded strings contain precisely the same information as the decoded version. Even from a lay perspective... it's as if the state issued a public declaration in Chinese, and translating to English was "accessing" different information than the Chinese original.