I'm very close to Smaldone, we worked on the same group of e-voting vulnerability research.
From the 4 initial group members, 3 of them were already raided, only I remain un-raided and un-arrested. Yeah I don't feel very safe in here.
This is obviously a payback for the government, not unlike Chinese arrests. But this is happening in a western country, and using modern cyber tools. Let me explain this part: Basically the police have software that analyze social networks, mainly twitter. So the software tracks your tweets and the detective try to solve the case that way. You might thing, this is a stupid way to solve a crime, and you will be correct. Add to this, the utter ineptitude of police agents using this software, and you have a ridiculous case like this. Smaldone is obviously innocent and you cannot assume someone is a hacker because he tweets about python and java.
Persecution to e-voting researchers is not new. All researchers from Brazil had to go into exile. Gov don't like hackers messing with the elections, and much less, publishing bugs.
But look forward to a future (very near future) where all your social network posts are actively monitored by, not one, but several government groups, that make inept use of analysis software to make life-altering decisions. This is why anonymity is so fundamental.