Some of these items need to be deployed with "black bag jobs" and that has some natural limits. Still, we know that people like Martin Luther King were the targets of dirty tricks campaigns, and that the treatment of people like Jacob Appelbaum indicate such dirty tricks are still in play.

There are enough prominent technology and finance people reading this who back controversial and truly disruptive technologies like bitcoin, biotech hacker spaces, open source crypto, etc. that they may have a reasonable concern about being a target.