2015-12-17 at 5:15 PM UTC
It just kinda seems too easy...
2015-12-17 at 5:25 PM UTC
nothing is ever truly 100% anonymous, information has to flow you know? but im reasonably sure its anonymous enough...but maybe not
2015-12-17 at 5:35 PM UTC
Instead of getting technical i am going to go ahead and agree with greenplastic here.
2015-12-17 at 5:36 PM UTC
Best thing to do is buy either a prepaid hotspot or a cheap smart phone(and root it), fund it with cash via reload cards, and then connect through the internet using that. You could then use TOR to make it harder to track down that device. They could still use triangulation though. Replace the hotspot device/phone regularly and use some strong encryption on your hard drive.
2015-12-17 at 6:14 PM UTC
Absolutely not. As much as they want to believe it is. The feds take down those that they feel is making a lot of money and also depends on the crime. That's why you see all the forums and marketplace now in tor banned members that even speak of child trafficking because that and counterfeit money is on top radar alerts for feds. If you got bullshit counterfeit money they could care less but try to sell super notes and see how long you last. They could track you down through a lot of ways but they usually follow the money trail. If your putting money in at one point your gonna have to withdraw that money.
2015-12-18 at 2:44 AM UTC
I guess it depends on what you take "totally anonymous" to mean. If we take anonymity to mean lacking identity then the answer is sure, tor (and only tor) is anonymous under the assumption asymmetric encryption exists (which we can take for granted, if the opposite is true then our world would be so radically different the last thing you need to worry about is the feds). Almost everything that runs on top of tor is not anonymous, because things don't really work without identity. But anonymity isn't what you care about when you're selling drugs right? Everyone knew who DPR was, he had an identity (the account) but ran SR with impunity and could have indefinitely if technical considerations were the only thing involved. Pseudonymity is what people usually mean when they talk about anonymity, which is divorcing one identity from another.
Like imagine you have one of those tin can/string phones or whatever. Assuming the other end is out of sight you can't possible know who's on the other side, they're anonymous. Once they start talking through they could tell you their name, you might deduce who they are by their voice, so on and so forth. It would be fair to say tor is anonymous, and that tails/torbrowser make efforts to be pseudonymous (such that your real identity can not be connected to your identity wrt a given site) and are generally successful (although there are high profile examples of failure in this department).
The "nothing is 100% anonymous" response is bit of a cop out. Firstly it's trivial to imagine situations with provably true anonymity (dead drops (ignoring location exchange) are a physical example with digital analogs) although they're not usually of much use and secondly there's a huge range of mediums of communication that are not strictly anonymous.
