When you're living a "nobody" life in the real world, and getting all this adoration in the online world, over time it's got to be difficult to maintain your distance from those who are validating you as some kind of revolutionary hero.
People get reckless over time. They sacrifice security for convenience in what seem like little, unimportant ways. When they've "gotten away with" something over a sustained period of time, they come to believe in their own invincibility - and DPR had a hell of a lot of SR users reinforcing the belief that he and SR were invulnerable.
Hell, take a look at the various SR 2 projects happening now. They're all claiming that they'll be more secure than SR and bigger and better when in truth analysing exactly what went wrong and working out how to prevent it happening again should take at least weeks, if not months - especially when only some of the information the feds have about SR and DPR is currently known.
Human beings have a habit of idealising people. We believe that people who are "smart" don't do dumb things. Yet time and again people enterprises fail because those who conceived them lacked the skills to properly execute them or because those who should have remained in the shadows sought public validation.
Take a look at the new SR 2 forums. The very first post is a "debut speech" by the "new DPR". Posting long philosophical ramblings provides opportunities for your speech patterns to be analysed and compared to other online writings. Anything the "new DPR" feels compelled to post should be short and clinical, but that horse has already bolted.
QFT. The guy's blathering about "someone in his position" in the transcripts pretty much belies a hazy roleplaying infatuation --and one that's certainly not unique to DPR himself.