The Wikipedia article notes that the press attention garnered by Nadim after his prior tussles increased the popularity of Cyptocat. Now imagine an intelligence

The Wikipedia article notes that the press attention garnered by Nadim after his prior tussles increased the popularity of Cyptocat. Now imagine an intelligence agency wanting people to make greater use of a system they have back-doored or which is vulnerable to attack by them. Perhaps they couldn't resist the urge to make Cryptocat more popular! (Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of Cryptocat or CSIS, and my comment is hypothetical speculation. Alternative hypotheses are that they are invading Nadim's computer to try to find a way to break Cryptocat or to spook its developer, or because they have Nadim under some sort of surveillance, for who knows what reason.) I do have a question about the story though. Why would an intelligence agency want to "acquire" Cryptocat? What would that mean anyway? Purchasing it for internal use is surely not necessary. They can just use it or any one of a number of in-house products they surely already have access to. Purchasing it to take it out of circulation is a possibility. But is this actually feasible? It's Open Source. Purchasing it to stop the developer working on it is a possibility. But wouldn't others step up? Buying a controlling stake in it is a possibility. But I don't see why an intelligence agency would make an offer of cash to someone not known to be susceptible to that kind of manipulation. I actually just don't see them doing this full stop. They surely know Nadim is motivated by idealism, not cash. So I can't think of a reason to "acquire" Cryptocat that actually stacks up. To work out what is going on here, you have to put yourself into the mindset of the individuals and organisations involved. And that is not easy if you simply have their media persona to go by. Like the rest of the population, these organisations tend to be filled with people of many different persuasions, from geeks and activists and hackers through ultra-authoritarians and rogue elements. It's impossible to know which group is responsible for this, or what their motivations might be. It might have even been an unauthorised operation! And it may just as easily have been someone spoofing CSIS, e.g. some hacker group angry at CSIS for some past grievance. If so, I bet it is baking CSIS's noodle just as much as Nadim's! At any rate, one should never infer a conspiracy where simple administrative or bureaucratic incompetence is a perfectly valid explanation.