? Do you only mean HTML <!--...--> comment tag, or JS/CSS code, or both? Do you merely mean reading them (like you said), or copying them, which is something different? Which legal jeopardy? Citation needed.
I searched to try to decipher your comment but couldn't.
But that didn't substantiate what you claimed. The journalist didn't just read the HTML (which contained 100,000 SSNs which were publicly exposed by Missouri DESE), he reported the leak, and gave them time to fix it before publishing.
Missouri Governor Mike Parson and Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson (an elected prosecutor, in a reelection year [0]) trying to label a bona-fide journalist as a "hacker" were bringing ridiculous charges to try to deflect from the obvious embarrassment, instead of dealing with whatever MI state agency/ies or contractor was responsible, and had never QA'ed their webpages.
Coming back to your comment, the issue was not about reading the HTML(/JS/CSS). Can you provide me a single citation where that was the issue? (Obviously, there's a separate issue about "How do you responsibly make a disclosure when you find a leak of private information in a webpage?")
