It’s a little more complicated than that... He didn’t just visit URLs, but downloaded that data, saved it, and posted it up somewhere else. Regardless of the “hacking” charge, posting people’s data is taking it too far. If he had just used it as a POC, that’d be different.

Despite obvious differences both in societal import and trivial details, weev's case was like a practice run for Assange's. Not only is the government using the same playbook, but the character assassins in traditional and social media are as well.