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by gwbas1c 1992 days ago
A lot of people confuse pseudo anonymity with true anonymity.

With tracking someone, "when there's a will, there's a way." The same thing applies to platforms like tor: If there's a will to track someone down, something like tor is mainly a speed bump; not a guarantee.

Just look at how the Silk Road was brought down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Arrest...

1 comments

It's a pretty steep speed bump. Roberts was caught because he was sloppy.

Centralizing the world under one ISP and legal jurisdiction would truly enable tracking anyone through Tor via timing analysis (but even then people would be able to use fancy, time-delayed mixnets). Outlawing/enforcing/banning any suspicious traffic from anyone ever would be a solid solution too. Mounting AI-monitored cameras behind every monitor or on everyone's forehead would be even better. Doing those things are even steeper speed bumps.

Or was it that he didn't have the know-how?

You need to have some pretty advanced knowledge to operate on the internet and not leave a trace.

It was literally because he used the same username in multiple places and, early on, he used an email address containing his full real name.[0]

If it's advanced not to do that, the bar isn't very high. :p

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Arrest