Could work if he never showed up at conferences and used Tor only, ideally Whonix/Qubes. But I think he left enough trail for the thugs to get him. 🙁
Discussion
It takes a single mistake. And in order to get anything done in open source you need to communicate a lot and with many people. So now you're leaving hints about your timezone(s), cultural background, language use. Or maybe you went to that one conference where you talked to five people, one of them describes you to the cops, mentions your accent or the hotel you probably stayed at. Then of course there's the usual DNS leaks, logging in with the pseudonym over the wrong connection. One single mistake.
Yes. Maybe we can get some communication scrambling with LLMs, timezone is easily hacked and still only provides little value.
It's quite possible that if the mistakes aren't too huge there can be multiple of them.
Timezone can be determined from when you're interacting. You can build in delays, but without a time machine you can't fully randomize timing.
The LLM thing is cool, assuming you run the thing locally.
By hacking I mean moving sleep schedule by a few hours. One can also set a specific short time window for interactions. This strategy is often used by players in realtime multiplayer online games.