I think it's all about how many clues you leave behind. If you make a HN account that you only access via Tor through a browser with Javascript turned off and stick your writing through some AI editing service, it's probably pretty difficult to trace anything back to you. If you stream yourself 16 hours a day every day, your nickname probably isn't saving you from much, as it only takes one person to go "oh I know them" and then your secret's out. So like everything, it's about a striking a balance. Who is out to get you, and how much do you like doing things online? Just a question you can ask yourself before you move into a cabin in the woods and work on your novel 24/7 or whatever. (Publish it under a pen name, though, obviously.)
You would be surprised at how easily they can be thwarted by simple technical maneuvers.
YMMV, but ime a lot of people have this bogeyman caricature of who the feds really are. The reality is that these are government agencies that pay significantly below market rate for really intense, highly demanding work shrouded with multiple layers of government grade red tape.
I think it's not a bad idea to overestimate the power of the government to track you; the common wisdom on the internet to make this assumption is probably a good thing so people are motivated to be as safe as possible.
On the other hand, it seems like the Tor users who get caught make clear, glaring mistakes in their opsec. And I always remember how long it took to catch the Unabomber, and how they apparently only managed to catch him because of his brother.
I think the biggest trick is to move around, so it isn't as simple as getting a single address. Like with Bin Laden, a lot of the work was figuring out where he was. And Ross Ulbricht, maybe he wouldn't have been caught so easily if he changed hosters occasionally and the VPN had listed 100 internet cafes in different cities as connecting IP addresses instead of just 1. Certainly that's the way Tor works, always hopping around routers. It's maybe a bit pointless though, once they get your legal name it's pretty much a matter of time.
It entirely depends on how motivated and how much resources they're willing to dedicate to finding you. They're probably not going to go to great lengths to catch a single copyright violation, so simple precautions may be good enough.
If you're a legit threat to national security, then yeah, they're probably going to find you no matter what you do.
If you're looking for privacy from your current and possibly future employers, you can obtain that by using a pseudonym online and taking basic measures to make yourself hard to dox. If you want privacy from the US government, that's not going to work.
Also, getting doxxed isn't entirely bad because it can open doors as well as closing them. Depends on how you leverage it. You just don't want the US government and/or the government where you live as your adversary.
> If you make a HN account that you only access via Tor through a browser with Javascript turned off and stick your writing through some AI editing service, it's probably pretty difficult to trace anything back to you.
This is already too hard. But anything that can be done needs to be wrapped up into a trivial to use interface. It has to be for everyone, not just people who are technologically {capable,knowledgeable} and have the time and energy to do this all the time every time. It needs to be standard.
Of course, we should fight this from both ends. Many ends. We shouldn't collect the data. We shouldn't process it. And we should build defenses.
But by doing this (Tor etc), you've also potentially identified yourself as a person of interest who warrants further scrutiny. It begs the question: what are you trying to hide.
