being liberal in a conservative community, for example.
There is a great deal of self-censorship that I do because I expect every comment I make to come back later be it positive or negative. It's less of "Oh I won't post that comment" and more of "I won't go near that forum/board/community in case I were to get doxxed". It's just that trying to be anonymous is so hard and even people that think they are doing a good job slip up all the time and get doxxed. If people trying their best fail what hope do I have?
DPR screwed up by running the largest drug trafficking system in the world. I make software to play old video games. While I'd love to flatter myself into thinking I were that important, I doubt I'm going to get the force of the entire US government trying to link my identity over my perfectly legal online actions.
But yes, anyone can eventually screw up. The nice part is that my real name is also really common. I can just make a new pseudonym if I have to. Changing your real name, still doable, but not quite as easy.
Agreed and I understand that it was the government that linked his identities I think that while they may currently be the only one's able to do that today I don't trust that they anyone won't be able to do that in a few years time. Look at how old/bad/cracked encryption can be decrypted in hours on even your parent's desktop computer and how things thought secure just years ago can be cracked with supercomputers or cloud computing today.
While I agree with most of your post I don't agree with this statement. In my opinion hiding behind a username not tied to your real identity is nothing more than a stopgap, eventually someone will link "byuu" with who you really are or more likely you will make a slip up and expose yourself. DPR did everything he could to conceal his identity while running SR and he still screwed up. Even if you don't make a mistake I believe that we aren't too far off from computers being able to analyse written comments/posts/tweets/etc and then link identities together based on writing style, posting time, and other metadata. It is because of this and the following two reasons that I nearly always post under "joshstrange".
1) I stand by what I have said and when I find out I'm wrong I like to publicly admit that. I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect, none of us are.
2) By posting under my real name I am less likely to say something that I will have to backtrack on, it would be a lot easier to spew off the cuff responses (which I'm still not perfect from doing) thinking that I was hiding behind some username that would never be linked to me.
Pretty much I think that one day all my other identities will be easily linked back to me so why try and hide?