This is exactly the point: never expect that the people running a service are going to go to prison or pay a significant fine to protect you. It's not going to happen. You need good OPSEC, yourself, because you don't want to go to prison.

I partially agree, and partially disagree. No i don't expect volunteer sysadmins to take huge risks for me. However, i expect huge organizations like Protonmail who claim to care for privacy to do just that.

Moreover, the risks in this case are not big because this is a clear case of political repression and any form of judicial scrutiny would have raised considerable eyebrows.

When was the last time you heard of sysadmins ending up in prison, apart from obvious criminal conspiracies like Silk Road?

see my other comment in this thread for more detail on how that's a misinformed argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28434187

> apart from obvious criminal conspiracies like Silk Road

You are being downvoted because the only person to whim Silk road is an "obvious" criminal conspiracy is you.

haha thanks for explaining. I'm personally not in favor of drug criminalization, i was referring to the fact that by law that is considered a criminal conspiracy.

but also i'm not exactly super fan of defending Silk Road, since there was some "hitman hiring" scheme involved at some point in the operation