Cool way of releasing a message. The thief clearly has some familiarity with Bitcoin.
Familiarity with Bitcoin? Perhaps not so much... There's lots of more interesting ways to embed a message in Bitcoin transactions if you're familiar with the data formats and the protocol, such as the one described here for example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34458Having the transaction amounts be binary seems a bit rudimentary, actually.