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by mtgx 2768 days ago
>It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway

How can you say something like that? What does "oppose" mean to you exactly? Being the leader of a 1 million-strong protest group? If so, then yeah, I would expect such people to be very careful about how they protest online.

But everyone else? Come on. Most people, even most dissidents, are not tech-savvy. There even was a recent story about NYT whistleblowers sending classified data to NYT via WhatsApp, without ever making the connection that their phone number used in WhatsApp could be linked to them.

The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.

1 comments

> The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.

Although this is true my personal experience is that in non-democratic societies there is a huge overlap between people who are tech-savvy and dissenters, you just don't pump into an article about the Tiananmen Square massacre, you actively seek it and you understand the risk behind looking for something like this.

I'm not saying they're world-class experts but they'll at least know to use a VPN.