Not necessarily.

I briefly pretended to be a criminal, mostly for fun. (Most readers will go "Uh huh" at this, but it was just a game.)

Say you're developing the next Silk Road. Say you have perfect opsec, and you never reveal any personal info. What are your risks?

The #1 risk is discovery of your physical location. Before every action, you must ask yourself: Will the next keystroke get me caught?

It takes immense discipline. I think rtm could probably do it if he put his mind to it. Maybe tlb. Few others seem to have the personality for this.

Solving the location hiding problem is the first step toward doing anything untoward. It's not as simple as "just use Tails." Try to build a service and you'll discover all the reasons.

Money is the other half. I guess I may as well tell the story. You need money in certain situations, and bitcoin isn't always good enough. You need untraceable cash that you can spend online. You also need burner phones that can't be tied to your physical location in order to sign up for all the normal services. If you use Tor, you'll quickly discover that ~every service prompts you for a phone number during account creation.

I solved this in a simple way: I waited until the middle of winter, then went to goodwill and bought a bunch of clothes, old shoes, and a facemask. I stuffed all of this in a trashbag, then paid a taxi in cash to drop me a couple miles from a certain store that had both prepaid visa cards and burner phones.

For the first half of the walk, I looked like a normal person walking along at night, carrying a trashbag. I ducked into a neighborhood whose streetlights were out, and went in between two houses. It was nearly pitch black as I put on the clothes from the trashbag. I left the bag plus my old shoes hidden there, then continued for the rest of the walk to the store. I bought $400 worth of $50 gift cards and two prepaid phones, then did the whole operation in reverse.

Why? Because when your opponent is a nation-state, you have a risk of being found via any other method. You can't drive anywhere because of license plate trackers. You can't show your face at the store thanks to facial recognition. You can't wear the same outfit without being picked up on CCTV's near your home base in the same outfit that you were wearing at the store.

The same care has to be taken when activating and using the burner phones. Every usage has to be treated as an operation, not an errand, or you're caught. You have to assume one mistake => caught.

It was very satisfying having $400 in untraceable cash to set up an untraceable service, complete with an online persona with gmail, twitter, github, and every other normal service.

The reason for this level of paranoia was that in addition to being a game, one of my main ambitions has been to fight against drug cartels. I wanted to use technology to do this.

My hypothesis was that right now, the main reason cartels are so powerful is that nobody is in a position to talk. Say you're a peon in a cartel: someone who unloads the drug buses that run from Mexico to Chicago, for example. You have very valuable knowledge: what times the buses will arrive, where they're unloading, who's involved. But even if you wanted to snitch, you'd suffer a fate worse than death if you're caught. What are you going to do? Keep submitting this info as anonymous tips to the FBI's website? There's no organized resource for peons to report activities like this. That's why I wanted to build one. It's like SecureDrop for fighting cartels rather than governments.

As you can tell from me posting this casually, nothing ever came of the experiment. But if it had, I would've slept quite soundly knowing my location was untraceable even with government-level resources aimed at tracking us down.

All of this is to say that the "location problem" is very relevant to pretty much any serious activity, government or not.