How much time they may take to track me down?

Question

What I did:

1. I used Tor Browser Bundle and created a fictitious Facebook account. The Facebook was registered through a fake email, No personal information was given.
2. I uploaded the video and copied its direct link.
3. Through TBB, I sent by email the link to the Home Minister and Human Rights Organisation.

Anyways, the hunt to track me down is on. As the question of law is involved, my country can issue warrant to seize the exit node or something like that.

Can I really be tracked down if the whole government (which is in power these days and the Minister/politician is one of them) wants go to any extent. I am in one of the Asian countries. At the time of hosting video, the exit node was that of Italy and the IP address which went inside email belongs to exit node of Romania.

Kindly guide me on this matter.

1, For how long should I use the same bridges? I feed 6-7 entry bridges (not obscure bridges) in the TBB and use them until they expire. Is it the right way?

Answer 1

Your question is quite hard to answer, because I don't know many of such cases where all details are known. However your question deals a lot with operational security (OPSEC).

One of the important OPSEC rules is to never talk about your plans or what you did. You clearly violated this rule. However the occasional reader as well as Stackexchange might not be able to deanonymize you. I assume you also used some precautions here. It is quite important to never talk about to people who know your real identity or are able to track you down. This often led to deanonymisation in the past.

Furthermore if you're writing texts you should be aware that one can try to identify by the way you are writing (stylometry). So be careful when writing texts online. Try to adapt to another style.

You used the Tor Browser Bundle. The first question that comes to mind is how you downloaded the TBB. So when to few people using this kind of software, the attacker might be able to track you down with this knowledge. The attacker knows when the incident happened and when the video was uploaded/sent. If there are only a few downloads from a small set of IP addresses, he needs to check those people.

The bundle writes some data to your disk (see Can I expect the Tor Browser Bundle not to leak information to the file system an other applications? and How to stop the Tor Browser from storing sensitive data in its .local directory?). So you should delete all those data.

What is usually out of scope is a seizure of the exit node. This has to happen in a timely manner and even than the chance of finding some usable data is next to zero.

In general: The more you stick to OPSEC rules the harder is it to track you down. On the downside can a minimal blunder completely reveal your identity. So stay quiet, calm and safe.