No, he's saying that anyone who checked their order status shouldn't notice (by design), but maybe that part of the process failed this time.
Also, that failure might be technical or intentional. As I mentioned on another subthread, it's always possible this was "accidentally" exposed by an employee working at the merchant or postal service. The program would require their cooperation. After all, we first learned about the telco spying because telco employees spoke up.
As for whether it's conceivable that NSA would target a Tor developer? A few months they were spying on our close friends and allies simply because they could. If that same mindset were applied to the intercept program, then this isn't impossible to imagine. Just because the NSA and administration has finally recognized their overreach and has started backpedalling doesn't mean these programs change overnight.
It is difficult to predict NSA actions, but opportunistically putting up inexpensive surveillance on all Tor users and nodes seems like a reasonable thing to do. As a developer she is a Tor user and also probably operates a few Tor nodes [for debugging and testing purposes]. So she would be in that group. I think this is plausible. I doubt that NSA would specifically target a Tor developer in US, without court order, as this would probably be illegal. [Although subverting some Tor developers, especially ones who build Tor binaries would be useful.]
Also, that failure might be technical or intentional. As I mentioned on another subthread, it's always possible this was "accidentally" exposed by an employee working at the merchant or postal service. The program would require their cooperation. After all, we first learned about the telco spying because telco employees spoke up.
As for whether it's conceivable that NSA would target a Tor developer? A few months they were spying on our close friends and allies simply because they could. If that same mindset were applied to the intercept program, then this isn't impossible to imagine. Just because the NSA and administration has finally recognized their overreach and has started backpedalling doesn't mean these programs change overnight.