While that linked article does not directly talk about relay early, this article does: https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-tor-users https

While that linked article does not directly talk about relay early, this article does: https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-tor-users https://blog.torproject.org/did-fbi-pay-university-attack-to... The article says that they likely did not have a warrant and simply just went and hired the researcher directly. But fair enough, the claim that hundreds did get tracked down and arrested, due to a bug found by a security researcher after getting hired by the FBI, is true. People selling zero days vulnerabilities is a major problem to security. Sadly it is something which new threat models need to take into consideration. The Tor Project did change how the Tor browser bundle updates, and I suspect this event did also caused some ripples in the project in how much they can trust researchers.