@dalias @Qbitzerre @ireneista > Visa gift card purchased with cash?
The particular card numbers tend to be registered to which places they were sold at.

That can give a fairly good idea of operational area.

> if you take drug-dealer-level precautions around acquiring it, sure, but that's difficult for a reason

> I really don't think pigs are going to go hunting for old grocery store surveillance footage or whatever over a vps halfway around the world that's torrenting. Am I wrong about this?

Depending on what you share? Yes. Things that inconvenience feds will absolutely result in that kind of effort, if traffic analysis didn't already screw one over (which it probably did).

As for copyright fascists... most of them haven't /yet/ bothered to do that sort of thing because the low hanging fruit of torrenting in the clear is still a thing. But everything they'd need to start earnest doxing efforts is readily commercially available.

I vaguely recall a few hacktivists getting screwed over in a similar way (point of sale had cameras & they used a currency with no functional obfuscation) as well.