If this is true then it sounds like the FBI targeted him specifically because they figured his previous crimes made for good leverage.
It seems his mistake was not realizing that he was caught between a rock and a hard place. More colloquially he's in the FO stage after FA.
It doesn't seem like anyone is morally in the right, but it also seems like the defendant here was in a legal grey area to begin with.
I don’t think willingly destroying your former employers property is a grey area. It is pretty cut and dry it is a crime. The feds used this as a wedge to get him out of the TOR game.
I mean, no, the defendant was definitely not in a legal grey area. You might think it's a moral grey area? But he broke into a data center facility and unplugged a bunch of servers, and brought a company down for a month in the process, out of spite. That's a pretty normal crime. He was lucky not to have been prosecuted, and his luck ran out.
I called it a grey area because there were mentions in this thread that the statute of limitations to prosecute those crimes were close to expiring. That means it looked like he could have gotten away with it without major consequences if not for the fact that he was doing enough shady stuff to attract the attention of the FBI.
He was prosecuted within the statute of limitations for the crime, and probably not too far out of the normal bounds between a criminal act and a federal prosecution. Federal prosecutions are relatively rare compared to state prosecutions, federal prosecutors don't take nearly as many "flyers" as states do, and the feds very often wait a long time before pouncing; this is all consistent with their M.O.
In this particular case, I don't disagree that there was probably motivation to the prosecution! They probably did want something from Rockenhaus, and, when they didn't get it straight up, looked for leverage. Unfortunately for Rockenhaus, he had given them a lot of leverage. It looks like it was a lay-up case.
You can call that a moral grey area and I won't disagree, but my point is just, it's not remotely a legal grey area. Rockenhaus' experience of this prosecution is probably no different than that of a typical federal defendant.