Stay safe out there

Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of people like the Tor project [1], you can avoid going to jail by taking a few simple precautions:

1) Encrypt your hard disk [2]

I guess when the police arrive to seize your computer, it means you've already made a lot of mistakes, but it's better to be safe.

2) Use a virtual machine with all traffic routed through Tor

This accomplishes two things. First, all your traffic is anonymized through Tor. Second, keeping your personal life and your hacking on separate computers helps you not to mix them by accident.

You can use projects like Whonix [3], Tails [4], Qubes TorVM [5], or something custom [6]. Here's [7] a detailed comparison.

3) (Optional) Don't connect directly to Tor

Tor isn't a panacea. They can correlate the times you're connected to Tor with the times your hacker handle is active. Also, there have been successful attacks against Tor [8]. You can connect to Tor using other peoples' wifi. Wifislax [9] is a linux distro with a lot of tools for cracking wifi. Another option is to connect to a VPN or a bridge node [10] before Tor, but that's less secure because they can still correlate the hacker's activity with your house's internet activity (this was used as evidence against Jeremy Hammond [11]).

The reality is that while Tor isn't perfect, it works quite well. When I was young and reckless, I did plenty of stuff without any protection (I'm referring to hacking) apart from Tor, that the police tried their hardest to investigate, and I've never had any problems.

[1] https://www.torproject.org/ [2] https://info.securityinabox.org/es/chapter-4 [3] https://www.whonix.org/ [4] https://tails.boum.org/ [5] https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/privacy/torvm/ [6] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TransparentProxy [7] https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_with_Others [8] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay-early-traffic-confirmation-attack/ [9] http://www.wifislax.com/ [10] https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en [11] http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1342115-timeline-correlation-jeremy-hammond-and-anarchaos.html