Broadband Research principal John Kinnucan has earned 15 minutes of fame by deciding not to cooperate with FBI officials who wanted him to wear a wire and implicate a specific hedge fund client. He has taken to the media to excoriate the FBI and reveal their pressure tactics.

"The ones who arrived at my home made it abundantly clear that they believe I am guilty, and, therefore, so are all of my clients, and they threatened to arrest me on the spot," he writes in the New York Times.

The Broadband exec admits that some acquaintances think he made a mistake. "Many people seem truly astonished by my decision not to comply with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's request to wear a wiretap to record conversations with a client," he writes. "I have even been asked, 'Why not just agree to wear the wire to show that no wrongdoing had occurred?'"

In his mind, he thinks he and his clients are pure. "In deciding the propriety of our inputs, we look for cues in the marketplace. If major banks, whose compliance departments are presumably staffed with former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers, regularly publish industry data like iPhone build and Dell motherboard production changes, the rest of us can reasonably conclude that this must have regulators' blessing" he notes. "Otherwise, why would it have been allowed to proceed unchecked for years?" But that is a huge inference.

One issue is how such channel information was obtained. Is it the product of an insider leak of material nonpublic information? Was it an estimate based on other research? It's perhaps not so simple, which is why some are deriding his stand.

"So here we have it. Mr. Kinnucan outlines a straightforward case--of protecting his clients from law enforcement officials who're investigating what Mr. Kinnucan knows is legally questionable behavior," says the New York Observer. "And then he bravely stands up and asks, essentially, 'If this is so illegal, why has hardly anyone ever been busted for it?' What we want to know is why so many editors are letting this guy have such a massive platform."

It remains to be seen if he comes to regret making all of this so public. His mutual fund and hedge fund clients may prefer a lower-key approach. 

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