Whittaker's phrasing is ambiguous. Could be read as expressing one of a number of things:
- The paper/article is misleading and distracting from meaningful threats to privacy.
- That the original tweet is using misleading accusations to distract us from the article's revelations of meaningful threats to privacy.
- That Appelbaum's authorship of the research is an unwanted negative association which undermines the attention deserved by the threats documented in the paper which are misleadingly justified as necessary by eg. governments.
It's difficult to know without a better understanding of Whittaker's position on the various matters at hand, so I don't know.
https://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor