All that plus the fact that, under general surveillance, behaving in a way that is consistent with avoiding tracking at great inconvenience is a great way to get flagged.

jmp.chat can be paid for with a virtual card and not tied to any ID. However I have it associated to my real ID in this case as it is the number everybody knows.

I use the word 'mitigate' not 'solve' since closed source baseband modems are a problem. Cellular traffic is off in airplane mode, but the baseband could be exploited if someone wanted to find me AND knew which IMEI to target. Because the IMEI has never been associated to me, that is a challenge.

I run my own VPN and share it with a few other people.

>I run my own VPN and share it with a few other people.

How confident are you in your VPN server configuration skills? Gaining access through mis-configured self-hosted boxes is the easiest attack vector usually as most people who self-host aren't experts in the software they are using leading to leaks. Besides that, do you keep a list of packages installed on your box, open ports, etc? How about security patches and regular updates as well as auditing access logs to ensure no one gained access to your box?

We're talking about the FBI here. They see traffic coming from a server. The ask who's server it is, your host tells them your name and address. The FBI asks the host for physical access to the server, and installs whatever monitoring they want regardless of your patch schedule. The FBI asks them to keep this off the access logs, and they do.

You might be assuming I am trying to evade an APT or I am of any interest to them. That is a fun rabbit hole to go down, and I realize they could spend resources to pursue these avenues. Other comments summarily say that if you try to protect your privacy too much, you automatically become a person of interest. The measures employed by an APT to target and monitor someone at these levels are expensive. They do have abundant resources, but they would be wasting much money and lose focus if they targeted every privacy seeking person. After spending thousands of dollars, they would find nothing interesting on me other than someone with above average tech knowledge who just doesn't like to be followed around. The suggestion that I am flagging myself for surveillance is ridiculous. If I am wrong, I hope they do surveil me to learn this themselves.

I'm willing to bet that if you generate roughly the same data as your peers, you're invisible, but if you generate NO data at all, you become worthy of checking into, as either the algorithm has no ability to correctly record your data or you are working very hard to hide yourself from the system, possibly for nefarious reasons, and therefore need to be monitored just in case.

Squeaky wheels get the grease and squeaky nails get the hammer, but silence in a noisy forest is alarming.