Comment Re:Bad news. (Score 1) 206
It's like the leaf you stepped on. Find enough, and I can pick up your trail.
I would look at it differently. It's like the leaves are stepped on by many people. If I can identify the exact set of leaves that you stepped on, I can pick up your trail. But if you're mixed in with a lot of other people, identifying that set is much more difficult, and maybe simply economically infeasible.
Now, if I understand you correctly, I believe a significant part of your argument is that there are many "side trails", shall we say, each obviously tied to your persona in some way, and those can all be grouped together which can provide a much more accurate picture than any single data point alone. This is a good point and pretty important for anyone who is looking to stay anonymous for a long time.
However, if each side trail which links to you is obviously you only at the moment it leaves the main trail of heavily trodden leaves, the best I can do as an investigator is to make note that you're (for example) receiving money from many seemingly random sources, and that I should ask you where that's all coming from, since, you know, money laundering is illegal and all, so you're not doing that, right? That's a problem for you in its own right, but it isn't necessarily enough for me to tie you to other stuff.
The accounts were legitimate to begin with. Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex.
Certainly the money itself isn't good or evil, but pretend for the moment you're an investigator who's identified some illicit transaction, and now you're tracing it. You might say informally that some of the money is "tainted" in the sense that it is involved with (or is the same as) the money used in the original transaction. That is what I meant by legitimate/illegitimate accounts.
but everything you do online leaves a trace of you behind.
Yes, but if you take care, that trace is tied only to what you intended it to be tied to. For example, you can create new usernames and passwords at any time; these are not necessarily automatically tied to your other leaves. On top of that, mixers are intended to help untie things. Your point that they also tie together all the people who would use mixers is a good one; ideally, a mixing transaction would be indistinguishable from a regular one so this would be less of a problem.
That said, "taking care" is often incredibly difficult. It is usually enough to sacrifice some security in exchange for some convenience, but it depends on who you are and what you're doing, of course.