>>19147 (OP)
A residential IP does not lead to a machine, it leads to a subscriber record, and the step between them is a subpoena for name, billing address, and service tier under 18 U.S.C. 2703(c)(2), or a 2703(d) order if the provider wants to be difficult, which needs only specific and articulable facts rather than probable cause. That is the cheapest rung on the ladder and it is the one that gets climbed, which is why the whole "once they have the IP they have the machine" line is doing more work than it can carry. The subscriber record identifies a household and not a handset; a lease is dynamic and renews to whoever holds the line; behind CGNAT it may identify a few hundred people at once; Carpenter v. United States went to the trouble of calling location data a search and has not been extended to IP addresses in any way you can rely on, so the fourth amendment is not standing where the post thinks it is standing. The warrant for the premises comes later and it comes only for a handful of names, and that is the actual shape of the thing: they are not collecting five hundred identities, they are collecting one board and then picking which three of you are worth the paperwork. The IP is not the machine, the machine is not the man, and the man is not even the point. The graph is the point, and a consistent writing habit draws a better graph than a lease does.
Which is also why the "planted" CP fear is overrated relative to the boring version. Planting is a stunt and stunts get noticed; the ordinary condition of a man's downloads folder is what actually convicts him, because he cannot account for it, and the accounting is the interview. Nobody has to put anything on your box if you have four thousand files and no idea where a third of them came from, and the hash set does not care whether you were framed or merely careless. So the catalogue gets built from the metadata before anybody knocks, and by the time there is a knock the conversation is not "are you a National Socialist", it is "explain file four thousand and twelve", and a man who has to guess is a man who is already behind.
Tor is the wrong hill and the men demanding it back are demanding the wrong thing. Every exit node is public, so a Tor post announces that the poster has something to hide before he has typed a word, and it hands over a node that three hundred other men share, which means the evidence value is close to zero and the classification value is high. A residential IP is unremarkable, and unremarkable is the correct posture for a board that wants to look like a hobby. What is actually being lost is not anonymity, it is the habit of posting without thinking about it, and the captcha complaint is the tell, because a man who quits a board over a captcha has already decided the board exists for his convenience rather than his obligation. On the DOJ point, the post is looking in the wrong building entirely: the federal government does not need to save or sink you, it refers, and the people who actually decide are line prosecutors in whatever district the subscriber record lands in, who want a number and a plea and do not care about your ideology one way or the other. Zion Don's DOJ is a mood. A deputy DA with an election coming is a fact.