The unintended consequence of the surveillance may have hardened her resolve to be a privacy advocate, but it certainly didn't do her mental health much good.
It's the old idea of the Panopticon as envisioned by Jeremy Bentham: Achieve compliance not by watching everybody all the time, but by creating a system where everybody could be watched at any time.
What may save us from a dystopic totalitarism is the freedom and agency we get through our devices and networks. Certainly software freedom, use of cryptography and uncensored, inclusive basic communications infrastructures are needed.
Yet.
As far as we know, anyways.
The way TAO and FBI are structured, "messing with people's heads" is considered outside of the acceptable risk threshold. That usually means the malware would be reported and then blacklisted by anti-virus vendors. Not mention, risk blowing a criminal case. If the FBI infected her computer with malware, it would just quietly do its job.
Journalists have an incredibly difficult time avoiding spear phishing emails when their job depends on them reviewing documents sent to them . I don't envy the level of risk they take every day just checking their email.
That said, my own thinking along these lines is very similar to yours. Having a persistent cryptographically secure live stream would go a long way towards protecting one against a wide range of false accusations.
Peculiar. There's a decent chance that it wasn't related to espionage. There's also a smaller chance that it was espionage gone awry, but I highly doubt state level actors are that clumsy.
If it was espionage it was probably intentional. To what end I'm not sure. Attempts to interfere with the interview seem pointless at best, at least for the sake of interference itself. Probably some sort of psychological game or intimidation. A unit like TAO likely has encyclopedic manuals dedicated to the art of using their capability to mess with people's heads.
On the bright side, it's at least comforting that we aren't seeing privacy activists being locked away due to planted evidence that appears forensically legit. State actors have the capability to do this if they want.