Likely, data may have been encrypted but he may have leaked compromising metadata. Even more likely it was bad operation security linking a personal identity to his anonymous persona.

I'm always thankful for incompetent criminals.

In the list of apps he was using I don't see any mention of a VPN. How much you want to bet he raw dogged it with encrypted apps over the clearnet so it was trivial to leak his real IP address

It sounds like he created material, not only AI but actual children then distributed it. The tools to track down the creators of CASM is only getting better.

A single legal image of any of those children posted to social media is going to allow algorithms to make the match and its routine detective work from there.

It only takes one child to talk. No amount of encryption is going to stop that.

i watched some documatnary about hackers, and usually, they catch them because they talk way to mouch about themselves.

All this is obvious.

Since nobody pressures Signal and Wire in Europe, it really seems to me that the pressure is mostly applied to those who do have the ability to spy upon their users.

That would be too optimistic about humanity, but maybe not. What if.