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.