Ed Foster's Gripe Log makes a reasonable case that Apple went after the online journalists in Apple v. Does in order to frighten them away from the Apple+Intel story (Did Apple Sue the Rumor Blogs to Keep Intel Deal Quiet?). Others have made this case, but Foster puts it together well:

Apple's legal crusade against the press over the last six months has struck many observers as being a little too Big Brotherish even for a control freak like Steve Jobs. Why would any company want to adopt such strong-arm tactics against loyal fans whose only crime was to care enough about Apple's products to want to report the rumors they heard about them? It made even less sense when, in one of the cases, Apple tried to get the courts to enforce a subpoena allowing them access data from a reporter's ISP in the hopes of determining who his sources were. That was guaranteed to raise hackles not just in the press but also with a broader contingent of privacy and freedom of speech advocates.

And Apple was bringing all this opprobrium down on its head supposedly for the sake of smoking out the sources who'd tipped off the weblogs on a couple of less-than-earthshaking stories. Not only did it strain credulity that Apple would care that much about the reports of a sub-$500 Mac and a FireWire audio device, court filings subsequently made it obvious that Apple had not bothered to conduct a serious investigation of the employees who were the most likely suspects. So while willing to argue the First Amendment should be trashed to allow them to apprehend the dastardly fiends who might have violated their non-disclosure agreements, Apple didn't really seem that interested in actually unmasking them.