I usually agree with you Mark, but in this case I have to disagree.
Sierra's failure to properly secure their server cannot turn what would otherwise be a perfectly legal act into a crime. If Sierra had properly configured split horizon DNS, and left zone transfers enabled, then a zone transfer would have only returned information intended for the public. This would have included the information that David Ritz was probably looking for, but not the internal information that could be damaging to Sierra's security.

I also think it's moot as to whether this information was gathered through a zone transfer or a collection of DNS queries. Although a zone transfer will give you all the information quickly I don't think there's anything you get in a zone transfer that couldn't be retrieved via regular queries (Admittedly a lot of carefully crafted queries)

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