A journalist is protected by freedom of speech and freedom of association. We are not, no the other hand, free to take and publish data that is not ours from, f

A journalist is protected by freedom of speech and freedom of association. We are not, no the other hand, free to take and publish data that is not ours from, for instance, filing cabinets or servers, no matter how good or bad the security is. A better example would be a competitor walking into an open office, opening a filing cabinet, taking yearly accounting reports and publishing them right before an IPO in order to tank the stock value. This is much closer to what weev actually did. To follow your analogy further, the Chinese spies who socially engineered access to RSA's security hashes wouldn't be guilty either. A security hole, like an open door, is not a tacit abdication of rights to a company's data, nor a tacit invitation to do any and all kinds of harm to the company with that data, nor a tacit surrender of all legal means to recoup damages resulting from the stolen data.