Probably. If you use a laptop once, on a public Wi-Fi hundreds of miles from where you live, while not being caught on surveillance, while using a stripped down privacy based OS, and then route yourself through Tor, you might be okay.
Yeah, but if there is an exception to that, it'd be the scenario we're talking about.
Meanwhile, detectives scoured video footage from cameras in the area and picked out a white Hyundai Elantra driving past the house three times before stopping on the fourth pass shortly after 4am. The car left 16 minutes later “at a high rate of speed”, according to Payne
Meanwhile, FBI investigators trawled through Kohberger’s cellphone records and discovered that he turned it off shortly before the attack, perhaps thinking it would help him to avoid detection. The phone springs to life again at 4.48am on a road out of Moscow.
The records also showed that Kohberger was in the area near the house at least a dozen times in the months before the attack, usually in the early morning or late evenings. Investigators said they were examining whether he “conducted surveillance on the King Road residents and was in contact with any of the victim’s associates before or after the alleged offense”.
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/calgary-travel-time-informatio...
- tor + cubesOS set up by somebody you deeply trust (person A)
- on a USB bought by a different person (person B)
- with a network card bought by a different person (person C)
- many miles away, wearing generic clothes in a cafe where people go to work
- different hairstyle and facial hair
- mask
- without having a phone (obv)
- navigating there by changing multiple cars with minimal electronics
- ordering the most boring coffee
- persons A, B, C don't know each other. You don't know personally B, C, but a person(s) D, (and E) can vouch for them.
My gut tells me that the more people you involve, the easier it is to trace you because you will be at the intersection of those people's radii.
The fatal flaw in the plan:
Barista talking to news after person is arrested by FBI: "As soon as they ordered the brewed coffee with no customizations after standing in line for 10 minutes, I knew something was suspicious. Who comes to Starbucks, stands in line for 10 minutes, and then orders boring coffee?"
There's a chance that you'll get caught on camera at Starbucks. But the cameras there, if any, aren't set up to provide full coverage and are rotated every few days.
Don't involve any other people , don't wear a disguise. If you're going to alter your appearance in any way, do it when you meet the seller to pick up the laptop.
added: You might want a burner phone to call the cab. But normally a motel desk will do that if you ask nicely.
If you leave your cell phone at home that would help, but you still risk being tracked by your car or being caught on any number of cameras and identified via facial recognition.
This assumes they are already looking for YOU.
At a certain point, the world is full of so much metadata that you really can't control your own. Want to turn off location services? Make sure you turn off WiFi too, because a list of nearby access points and SSIDs is enough to pinpoint you down to a few meters. Want to spoof your location when using an app with network services permission? You'll need to spoof nearby access points and their transmission power to match them to somewhere in the real world. And you better make sure to do it inside a Faraday cage. Because no matter how careful you are, if someone else is walking by your clever hacking nest, and they do have location services enabled, then their phone will be able to pair their geolocation with your unique access point topology. Oh, and even with the Faraday cage, the fact your phone is seeing access points that no other phone has seen is a unique data point in itself.
Point is, you can be compromised without any action on your own part. Traffic analysis is hard to defeat, but you can mitigate against it by not committing crimes that motivate the government to spend resources on tracking you across disparate systems like mobile networks and traffic cameras. Or if you must commit those crimes, then you'll need to make sure everything you do is in the fattest part of the bell curve for every possible statistical test the government can use to analyze common behaviors.
Not just wifi, bluetooth is used for location tracking as well.
Before the internet and mobile phone age I can only imagine how much harder crimes like this were to solve.