Just as the title asks, curious as to what you more experienced folk feel on this matter. I wanted to ask but, couldn’t find quite the right spot for it: can one remain anonymous on the Internt, and if so can they do so securely? What would it take to achive near 100% anonymity? Better yet, what would any of the famous three letter agencies do to reamin anonymous?
Uhh yeah, anonymity is part of security, to an extent, but its more the other way around. Security is part of anonymity. If malware infects your PC, you can be deanon’d real quick.
The more practical question would be how much convenience is sacrificed for privacy or security.
The answer to that is it varies.
For example, I keep all my laptops encrypted. That’s inconvenient, but its only two extra steps: in goes the yubikey, then I put my password in.
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You can’t remain anonymous. If a state actor decides it needs you info, it WILL get it.
The first part of any real security question is deciding whom you’re trying to secure against. By and large, the common layman is perfectly good with the in-built security of modern operating systems, for instance.
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The no-such-agencies and their similars, don’t need anonymity not permanent/forever anonymity, and not for all the things.
They exist so they can enable/enhance various other operations through additional intelligence, to that end they perform their own operations to either directly observe additional information, or to reveal information through analysis and correlation.
As an individual, you yourself might need contextual good-enough anonymity in order to ensure safety, or to perform actions that are debatable by societal norms.
The problem is, the latter is getting harder, because of gap detection.
If everyone is being watched all the time, the one that is only seen a part of the time must be up to something.
It turns out it’s useful to know and differentiate between what government sponsored agencies are doing, can do, could do, will do, can’t do yet, might be able to.
It’s also useful to do our own similar analysis and correlation and extrapolate on those capabilities.
We know they know we know they’re watching, but there’s details and nuances, and nobody knows everything.
It’s also worth noting that in some cases you might be, as you say sacrificing security. You keep your finances in cash or crypto, instead of a bank. You’ll could lose them or get stolen from.
If you don’t have cameras on your front door, you could get assaulted by a degenerate neighbor. You don’t have dashcam on your car, a person from a bad neighborhood might jump in front. You don’t have tracking on your car, it could get stolen.
In all of these cases, there’s a spectrum of risk levels. And there’s a spectrum of mitigations that can let you preserve some privacy while still having security.
For example, dashcams, theoretically a dashcam could exist that would have mostly write-only storage. e.g. it would encrypt video with a set of single use keys regularly programmed into it and stored somewhere else safely by you. That way, only you have access to where you’ve been and what happened if/when you need to.
There’s another thing to keep in mind re dashcams - traffic cams, which actually aren’t everywhere and you don’t have access to them… so it’s dubious how much they increase your security.
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if you want anonymity today you gotta turn off your internet and snap your mobile in half.
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I’m pretty sure Satoshi Nakamoto would like to have a talk with you… or not. You also can argue that Snowden also avoided capture from state actors. Countries hate each other and he was quick to use that in his favor. Can’t say the same for Assange who allowed himself to be caught on a western US allied country.
Also, you might be right if by state agent you mention 5 eyes members. I don’t think say Belarus government has the power and skills to find and arrest a crafty person.
Here is a great resource if you want to find out more about the matter:
I think that while it is quite doable to stay anonymous while browsing the interwebs, the real challenge is that most institutions one depends on for living in our society are storing your information on their servers with questionable security and access for the government:
- Insurance Companies
- Healthcare Providers
- Banks and Credit Card Companies
- Transit Systems
Additionally, things like employment benefits will (in Europe at least) require you to hand over data including all of your bank statements for the past four months, without the ability to censor much.
And an even worse threat considering our growing ability to understand and manipulate the human genome, including the possibility of genetically targeted attacks, is something like the following:
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dont be to sure, they still have deep ties with russia and the fsb. they have ways of making you talk 
Even that isn’t enough anymore…facial recognition in more and more places as well as cash quickly becoming obsolete…crypto isn’t a good alternative anymore if easily tracing transactions is becoming more common place.
between the invasion of privacy that is targeted advertising and governments war on encryption, I imagine it will only get worse. Both for anonymity and security.
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