Welcome to Reddit thrwawhy!

Yes, strongly appears to be the same Mike Hearn. You can also see the use of the qinetiq email address in his commits/posts to wine from 2002-2005. You can see Mike's work on wine mentioned on his current CVish info on his website.

Is he still under gov/defence employment?

It's more or less impossible to tell, it's not like a state operative is going to helpfully and honestly self-identify.

But if so, he'd be the least well hidden operative ever.

Is this why he always pushes for tracking?

Ultimately we must judge words and actions, contributions and their merits. In Mike's case, in my view, after these things are considered there is no reason left to worry about if he's still on Qinetiq/GCHQ's payroll or not.

There are more important things to worry about. As I've said before-- it wouldn't even matter if Bitcoin were originally created by some spooky intelligence org: We must always judge Bitcoin based on what it actually does, as even someone with the best intentions can make errors. So it certainly doesn't matter if Mike Hearn is serving some other interest. In systems defined by their rules we judge things on what they actually do-- not what they're intended to do, what someone /says/ they do, or on the merits of those who propose them.

Ultimately, we must be robust against that sort of thing-- even if you did manage to catch one poorly disguised operative you're not going to catch all that the worldwide intelligence community could throw as us if they wanted. And, of course, it would be trivial to fake evidence that any person had "connections".

I believe the Bitcoin Community is already structurally robust against that sort of stuff. We should continue on with the business of building more and more protocols and tools which are inherently resistant to subterfuge and leave the gossip for the tabloids.

Part of being robust is not feeding rumor or drama, giving into to personal or emotional attacks, taking attempts to discredit with a big grain of salt, etc.