Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer is facing a 3.5 year prison sentence for pointing out some very blatant security holes in AT&T's system. His crime was compiling data which could be accessed without a password and without circumventing security measures. The only crime was AT&T's failure to secure their data.
As a programmer with decades of experience, I can only say that what AT&T did violates every rule of security and made private information easily available. Whoever wrote that code should be ashamed and punishing an innocent person will not fix that.