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                          THE TRUTH ABOUT ONLINE BUSTS

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MYTH: It's easy for law enforcement to trace people online.

FACT: This is not so unless you take zero precautions. Bouncing off any kind of
proxy will significantly hinder law enforcement. Bouncing off anything that
scrubs and then forgets your IP address makes tracing you via the network
nearly impossible once you have ceased sending traffic. Everyone who gets
caught is caught by traditional police-work or by following a trail of logged
IP addresses. While it is possible to carry out timing correlation attacks
against low-latency networks such as Tor, these are only within the
capabilities of intelligence agencies. There is no credible evidence so suggest
that these capabilities have been used to identify hackers, warez groups or
virus authors and they will certainly not be used against ordinary peer-to-peer
users.

MYTH: Uploading files anonymously is safe as long as my IP address is safe.

FACT: Traditional police-work (which LE is very good at) includes examining
meta-data of documents. Uploading files that can be linked back to you is a
good way to get busted. Most 'computer forensics' focuses on retrieving data
from hard-disks and scouring files for meta-data.

MYTH: My group will never be infiltrated.

FACT: This kind of thinking is what gets people busted. They allow
incriminating information (this includes IP addresses) to leak to associates
within a group. The group is infiltrated, and soon everyone is fucked.

MYTH: It's safer to be a "reverse engineer" and crack without releasing.

FACT: You are more likely to be busted due to being narced out by someone
peeping over your shoulder than being traced through bnc's by supposed FBI
magic, and cracking on your own machine is still illegal in the USA (with a
few narrow exemptions), regardless of how innocent your intentions are.

MYTH: Most traffic on the Internet is logged.

FACT: This is not even remotely true. Most traffic is not logged, because there
is simply too much of it to be stored. The establishment of a connection to a
server is generally permanently logged at the server, but rarely at the point
of origin. Firewalls and routers are not going to permanently log
ordinary-looking forwarded connections because there are simply too many of
them. Some data payloads may be logged during transit and at the receiving
end. If you go through three hosts on the Tor network, your packets travel
through many routers, and are encrypted at each point. Most of the time, these
packets are not logged anywhere anyway. There is no way for someone to
practically follow your trail through all of these routers, and nor can your
connections be logged at all of these routers indefinitely. You are most likely
to be identified by going through several rogue, cooperating Tor nodes
simultaneously, which is unlikely unless LE takes over the directory server.