Getting caught for doing something illegal.
Sometimes, these people were in fact innocent; the government has a track record for making examples out of people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time—trying to send a message that they’re serious about crackdowns.
One such case involved Barrett Brown, a journalist, activist and sort of press office for the prolific hacktivism group, Anonymous.
Inside a thread in Project PM, the online investigative community he founded, Brown stumbled across a zipped file containing Stratfor data.
This was part of the infamous Stratfor email hack of 2012, which leaked the global intelligence firm’s internal communications and client records to WikiLeaks who published it as part of its Global Intelligence Files (GiFiles) leak.
Brown copied and pasted that link of hacked data onto another forum so he and his team could discuss its contents for a larger investigation about the intelligence agency.
That’s all he did…copy and paste. Later, the feds arrested Brown and charged him with possessing stolen content.
Several other factors could expose your identity while on the deep web, such as using your real name and email to post on forums. These tend to give third parties a clue of who you are.
For this reason, people can expose their identity without you even knowing it.
This would give investigators enough time to monitor their activities and gather sufficient evidence to incriminate them after an arrest.
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