I don't know the OP's concerns, but for me, the facts
are these:

(a) he claims jtags on an HP 1U (a standard port for doing
installation/manufacturing) are there to permit 3d party
monitoring. I.e., jtags == NSA evil, per se.

(b) He claims MORECOWBELLs was for "BDA", battle damage
assessment. Literally. Literally BDA. I.e., his
belief is that a USD 100M drone drops payload on a
target, and then ... per Applebaum ... lossy unreliable
udp DNS packets (from a MORECOWBELLs node) are used
to assess impact (and not, for example, satellite,
the drone itself, or other traditional BDA).

The nub is that the MORECOWBELL slide deck talked
about the program using a BDA metaphor (good job, Booze
Allen), but Applebaum took this literally. As wrong
and misguided as done warfare is, they do NOT,
categorically, use DNS packets the verify damage on
the battlefield.

(c) He claims (@ CCC no less) that Ghostery is a
fine plugin for preserving your privacy, perfectly.
Without getting lost in nuance, Ghostery is great
for _trading off_ aspects of your privacy (mostly
network location), but it's not an anonymity tool.
(You can in fact buy a feed of "don't track me" users
from Ghostery in ad exchanges.) It's a fine business
model, but it's foolish of Mr. Applebaum to endorse it
as a privacy panacea. I think he's hardly looked into
the area of commercial tracking, focusing instead of
government-efforts. (Fine; pick your battles. But
don't push anonymity network users to a tool that exchanges
their IP for less ads. I kinda suspect they don't want
that, at any cost.)

(d) The code he writes is vulnerable to exploit, and not
trustworthy, IMHO. That statement is broad and needs
some justification. Just start with a review of
ttdnsd, which even the tails packagers note 'crashes quite
a bit'. I don't have confidence in any software
project he's signed off on. I'd accept suggestions, ideas,
but not a final signoff, and never his code tree.

(e) He should IMHO answer transparency questions about his
financial connection to the pTLD applications he supported
(the non onion TLDs). This was a blatant zone grab
by bitcoin operators. It would be fine if
this business connection were disclosed. Companies abuse
the IETF process all the time, but a least we know it's
a vendor proposal.

I could go on and on.

I'm not hating on Applebaum, and I hope the OP isn't either.
He's a charismatic speaker, a good advocate for privacy.
We need someone like that in the space.

Is he selling a book or tickets to talk? I'll go. Does
he have a new idea for a privacy tool? Let's listen
and reflect.

But: Is he selling software or hardware? Um, ok. Lemme
check first. IMHO he's a bad engineer, but the
press (Greenwald) is convinced he's solid, because he
wrote a few screenfulls of a C program (that crashes
and is vulnerable to attacks). Perhaps he could manage
a team of engineers at PureOS, but I think
(e.g., BDA) that he too often jumps to the wrong
conclusion.

This is just my opinion. The OP might have his or her
own reasons. I've kept mum about all these concerns
over the years, since Applebaum was merely loud and wrong,
and kicking people on the Internet is what the 'chans and
reddit are for.

Now it's different. He's not just loud and (IMHO)
wrong. He's asking people to trust him and buy something.
He's being offered as a 'brand', and I think it's fair for
me to comment.