Floating this tinfoil theory as I catch up the newest 40ish pages,
Im curious if Nick's crusade against Potentially Criminal correlates with when he started talking with Aaron. IIRC, Sean is giving legal advice to him and we know Methkieta has most likely read legal messages between them. Makes me curious whom else from Lawtube contacted Aaron and how Methieka treated them.
An added layer of tinfoil: suppose Nick's months of mild annoyance at Aaron's revelations about his personal life suddenly boiled over into the recent self-destructive vengeful rage because Nick somehow convinced himself (however mistakenly) that
@MNPublicRecords/
@MNPublicRecords2 were at all times a Steel Toe operation. Not necessarily done by Aaron directly but under his direction or at his urging, with a friend or superfan doing the document exfils locally, and perhaps with Sean's legal knowledge contributing some flair to the summary posts from afar.
To be clear I am
not suggesting that they ever did any such thing, and am only noting that the notion of them doing it is exactly the sort of idée fixe that Nick's paranoid swiss-cheese brain would cook up out of thin air and obsess about for months, to the point of even committing computer crimes in a desperate quest to find any sliver of evidence seeming to vindicate the delusion. It also jives with some offhand comments on streams like "and I have
nooooo idea who that might be" said with a sarcastic tone and laugh as if meant to convey that he was 100% cocksure in his belief about who it was, however mistakenly.
For even more tinfoil, suppose his holding to that misconception could also explain why he seems to have exhibited
zero concern about facing any consequences for self-incriminating bragging about unauthorized Google access: in his mind, if he's going down anyway and just wants to take someone down with him, then publicly confessing to a few extra crimes would seem a worthwhile sacrifice just to provoke investigators into going over the cybercrime victim's devices with a fine-toothed comb, in his vain hope that that this process would accidentally stumble upon some imagined proof that Aaron and/or Sean were the perpetrators of crimes unrelated to the one being investigated.
I prefer this theory for no reason other than how funny the seething would get when he finds out that such a gambit turned up nothing and the self-sacrifice was all for naught.