For example, I downloaded Tor network and using it for illegal activities. Can my govt track me? Can US govt track me? I know it encrypts something but if I remember correct, FBI was able to find some Tor users before.

Note: illegal activities was for example. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m just planning to serve my instance with a onion address.

  • mo_ztt ✅
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    5610 months ago

    Short answer: In theory, pretty much anything you’re doing on the modern internet can be traced back to you. It’s just a question of how much effort, sophistication, and time someone’s willing to invest in the tracing. Tor is a pretty high bar for them to clear, so it’ll protect you against a pretty high bar of attempting to track you down – but that’s only true as long as you’re not doing anything careless to compromise your own security, and it’s pretty easy to do something careless (especially in the long term).

    This DEFCON talk goes into a lot of the nitty-gritty details and reality. The speaker sold drugs on the dark web for quite a while, but eventually got caught and went to federal prison, so he knows both sides of it.