As careful as some of the things he suggests are...if you're truly wanted by a state-level actor or sufficiently motivated attacker, you won't be able to hide by simply using VPN and Tor. Especially if you're running something with many transactions like AlphaBay. You would need to obfuscate quite a bit more: - if you're using VPN traffic but most people "around" you aren't, you're a suspicious node; your ISP could e…
You're absolutely right. It is not enough to use anonymity tools, you also have to make sure everything else around you doesn't compromise your anonymity. Made me think of a Harvard bomb threat incident where the student posting a fake bomb threat (through Tor) to avoid final exams was the only person using Tor on campus at the time, which trivially identified him. https://theprivacyblog.com/blog/anonymity/why-tor-fa…
The timing could have been conincedental. Even if he was the only person online on campus at the time, it proves nothing.