Be anonymous
As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you&#x27;re truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won&#x27;t be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you&#x27;re running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more:<p>- if you&#x27;re using VPN traffic but most people &quot;around&quot; you aren&#x27;t, you&#x27;re a suspicious node; your ISP could easily flag you to your government. If you use wifi at a common point you&#x27;re likely to be flagged and there isn&#x27;t an easy way other than keeping on the move. But moving often is another anomalous event, and it&#x27;s very difficult to do even for Drug Lords ( El Chapo ) or Terrorists that it behooves to do. This puts you in a sort of <i>Zugzwang</i>, to borrow a chess term.<p>- there&#x27;s always leakage, for instance, in the way you talk with people in the real world. At some point you send enough communication for sophisticated frequency analysis.<p>- and there are other patterns of usage that could be used to identify you, like searches or even keyboard frequency on anonymized accounts can be de-anonymized by very specific markers ( ML works! ).<p>- off ramps for crypto aren&#x27;t very good. If you&#x27;re in e.g. Brazil, haha, yeah, good luck spending bitcoin or any other crypto and going unnoticed. Mixers and tumblers will eventually leak and you&#x27;ll be caught.<p>- you&#x27;re very vulnerable to social engineering by people you do business with. one slip where you stop communicating in a transactional mode of communication and that&#x27;s a weak link in your armor.<p>In the end, the FBI only has to be right once, and you have to be right every time.