really shady shit is next to impossible to hide against determined state actors. the pirate bay people were on a hitlist for a good while and one of them slipped up despite having literal tin foil / heat resistant plating on their homes to cover heat signatures of servers, faraday cages, no cell phones, and a billion redundancies. its more a matter of time.

cant remember explicitly what he said got him caught but for one of them (cant recall name) i remember him talking about the extreme paranoia of being hunted down by numerous conglomerates, how the officials in sweden were tugged and bullied by the USA, and the mistake of leaving asylum in laos for a literal holiday in cambodia that got him straight up kidnapped by headhunters

so dont create a cult of evildoer subversives if you dont like the look of prisons in your country. now if youre in russia or china youll be fine since they love it when people fuck with western economies. just make sure not to do anything anti-russian or chinese there

edit: so state actors figured out the location of everyone somehow but the smoking gun evidence was that one of the guys forgot to encrypt a single hard drive