Use TOR for menial stuff to create background noise
Regularly trade laptops and phones with like-minded individuals
Assume you've been breached and that the government has full attention to you
Be as paranoid as possible, any step towards lack of freedom for the sake of convenience is unretracheable
Not for myself but for other people in this world who aren't as lucky as myself in terms of freedom.
That puts you into a group of people then. Groups are easier to infiltrate.
In opsec, people are vulnerabilities.
But I like the idea of trading devices with people who have already tied their ID with IMEI, wi-fi networks, ISP IPs etc.
Identity theft? Not really... Just borrowing it for a while.
In your scenario, you’ll never know if the last person increments an ID somewhere or did some other activity that adds compromises the chain.
Not to say there isn't SOME anonymity by paying cash for a burner phone, but it's not even remotely fool-proof for anyone really wanting to figure out who you are.
I'm lucky enough not to live a pretty vanilla life and so do my peers. Please investigate and waste time and resources in tracking down the most boring and uninteresting (on a political and criminal level) persons you could ever snoop on.
It also becomes tricky to convince someone to lend you their phone in my country since ID cards are required to register any SIM cards.
As someone else above said, adding more people makes the rope (your opsec) weaker.
People generally can't be trusted once their self-preservation instinct kicks in. How sure are you the other guy you trusted enough to put them in your opsec isn't going to sing on you when their balls are gently fondled by LE agents.
LE stands for Law Enforcement.
But please do keep imagining things, it's a powerful tool to progress!
providing an obfs4 bridge seems good too
but I really wish there was a docker container for all this, the documentation is all over the place, most of it is just on forums that can only be accessed on Tor and those forums have unreliable uptime, it is really discouraging but it seems like there are some very competent people that are so comfortable doing this that one could just assume they all have this greater level of OPSEC and infrastructure