We don't know what jurisdiction this happened in - Belarus, Switzerland, or the USA. I doubt that Switzerland or the USA empower the police to force a private company to put up a bogus service on the internet - especially on behalf of China.
We also don't know whether the activist was taking advantage of Protonmail-to-Protonmail security, or whether one end of the connection was non-Protonmail.
My guess: they were logging IP addresses, at least for SMTP, and the activist was using SMTP.
We don't know what jurisdiction this happened in - Belarus, Switzerland, or the USA. I doubt that Switzerland or the USA empower the police to force a private company to put up a bogus service on the internet - especially on behalf of China.
We also don't know whether the activist was taking advantage of Protonmail-to-Protonmail security, or whether one end of the connection was non-Protonmail.
My guess: they were logging IP addresses, at least for SMTP, and the activist was using SMTP.