I got this from a "friend in the industry". I suspect that the government isn't trying to hard to keep things secret. It makes their job easier if we do it for them.
It all starts with
sfredbook.com. This was like eBay for prostitution in the western US
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_26081911/mountain-view-man-pleads-not-guilty-facilitating-prostitution. Whores put up ads with set prices for their services and pictures. Users could login and review the girls. This made sure that the pictures, services, etc. were "legit".
Of course the Feds shut this down. During the investigation it was revealed that the founder Eric Omuro was a silent partner in Bittrex. He and his wife Annmarie Lanoce were using crypto-currencies to wash money from the prostitution business.
At this point it was decided not to move against Bittrex so that investigators could learn the entire lay of the land. It turned out that the sfredbook founders had backed several cryptos and used Bittrex to sell these to the public.
Recently the SEC has received a spate of reports re scam IPOs, ICOs, etc. on Bittrex. As cryptos do not have legal existence they were powerless because altcoins are not money and they are not securities.
The rush of anon coins, dark market coins, etc. has also worried the FBI and related agencies who are again stymied because these "coins" do legally exist. Attacking them as legal currencies would have the ironic effect of giving the cryptos legal status through precedence and from there the owners of these cryptos legal rights and protections.
The strategy is to consider Bittrex in the same way the police consider a car a John uses to pic up a whore. This can be seized while the money in the John's pocket can not.
Through this backdoor the problem of scam ICOs and anon coins can be solved and the plan is to seize Bittrex and seize the blockchains of all coins released since May 1st of 2014.
Of course blockchains can't be seized but servers can. Merchants and exchanges can be pressured to delist/not accept, subpoenas can be sent to big holders. Nothing is anonymous if they want to task personal/resources. Once the budget is set then it an assembly line/minimal cost effort to grab another couple of thousand peoples' contact info.
It has been concluded that people and companies absolutely do not want to be on subpoena that mentions terrorism and underage prostitution when they could just shift their investments around to safer areas and avoid the whole problem.
The feeling is that organized bad actors began to seriously penetrate the market in May of 2014. Before that date altcoins were either low level individual scams or actual sincere efforts to create something new.
I'm shifting my portfolio out of Bittrex (obviously) and going though ANN files to look at foundation dates. There are a lot interesting ot of pre-May coins still out there and I'll bet some of them are going to get much more interesting very quickly