If the FBI ever made such threatening communications, RELEASE THEM. You are ALREADY in the sights if what the posts claimed to be are true and you shouldn't be afraid to do it.
Okay I'll bite, so I did the research on the case.
They posted nothing to prove he was arrested for refusing a deal with the FBI. What actually happened is he pleaded guilty to an offence in 2014 and violated the terms of his bond / probation. Unless they go forth and show more, it is horse shit.
Here is the individual pleading guilty:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.374280/gov.uscourts.mied.374280.1.1.pdf
He was arrested for not paying his bond, using a computer when he was forbidden to, ignored communications with his probation officer and more.
Here is the petition of warrant to see what violations of his Bond he used:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.374280/gov.uscourts.mied.374280.3.0.pdf
How could he have been operating Tor nodes past 2014 if he wasn't allowed to have computers?
I hate cops, but he deliberately tried to set them up. He refused to show up so they went to his door and so they arrested him. There were warrants out for his arrest.
Here is the arrest warrant:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.374280/gov.uscourts.mied.374280.20.0.pdf
Discussion
Here is what he was guilty of, what the poster in the Reddit thread claims is trivial and unrelated:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16117870/158/united-states-v-rockenhaus/
He had unauthorized access to a company's servers and then caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage by disrupting them.
Obviously, being convicted of a cyber crime will restrict your access to computers or only be allowed to run monitored systems. See the conditions of the bond I posted above. Why would you be running Tor or anything like that when you know you're being monitored? How naive does someone need to be? Even if he's allowed to later on, how does Tor in any way relate to what he's being arrested for? He's got a plethora of violations on his bond.
Also, the Reddit OP claimed he was targeted for using a 'Graphics driver' called SPICE. SPICE is a virtual machine remote access software. The transcript on their rockenhaus website literally mentions it's a remote management client.
SPICE Graphics driver is a good suspicion. You can circumvent monitoring through a virtual machine... It's so strange. Why do they omit these details?