Actually, I think the cat & mouse metaphor is fairly apt. The cat actually has a powerful set of advantages... but the mice have numbers, persistence, and in violation of the metaphor, a lot of learning capability. This will not be the first market the feds will manage to destroy, but it will get harder each time.

I am neither applauding nor deploring this; just predicting it.

(One of the things the mice may learn is that the slightest identity leak can give them away. One mis-click on a Facebook login or something and that could well be that. If I were a mouse, I would be working on building something like an encrypted VM image that only contains "safe" software on it, like browsers configured with TOR or whatever, and make sure to do all my business in that VM, and only my business in that VM, while maintaining a "normal" identity on the outside of the VM. The best way to prevent identity leakage is not to share it at all. And I would not install clipboard sharing between VM and host, and I would not enable shared windows; I would deliberately leave the VM console up, and distinctly less than full screen, so it is very visibly obvious that I am either in or not in the VM. I would not use any of the conveniences designed to blur that line.)