The network protocol, according to multiple sources and the presented talk at LCA, was "send text to the port that's visible in the URL, get text back". The data received was SCCS, which was an understood format with existing tools. And the tool Tridge wrote, sourcepuller, didn't clone all of BitKeeper, it cloned enough to fetch sources, which meant "connect, send command, get back SCCS".

Anything more than that is hearsay that's entirely inconsistent with the demonstrated evidence. Do you have any references supporting either that the protocol was more complicated than he demonstrated on stage at LCA, or that Tridge committed the network surveillance you're claiming?

And to be clear, beyond that, there's absolutely nothing immoral with more extensively reverse-engineering a proprietary tool to write a compatible Open Source equivalent. (If, as you claim, he also logged a friend's network traffic without their express knowledge and consent, that is problematic, but again, the necessity of doing that seems completely inconsistent with the evidence from many sources. If that did happen, I would be mildly disappointed in that alone, but would still appreciate the net resulting contribution to the world.)

I appreciate that you were incensed by Tridge's work at the time, and may well still be now, but that doesn't make it wrong. Those of us who don't use proprietary software appreciate the net increase in available capabilities, just like we appreciate the ability to interoperate with SMB using Samba no matter how inconvenient that was for Microsoft.