Government persecution of Christianity continued unabated until the fall of the Communist government, with Stalin's reign the most repressive.
Stalin is quoted as saying that "The Party cannot be neutral towards religion. It conducts an anti-religious struggle against any and all religious prejudices."

Overthrowing a Government just means you'll end up replacing it with something that'll eventually become worse.
The best course of action is to talk to them, remind them why Governments should be afraid of their people and not the other way around.

Please note, this doesn't necessarily mean using violence.

A true l33t cracker would NEVER engage an enemy with something as petty as violence or death...

He or She would realize that only escalates and encourages fear, he or she would engage the world with words.

One of the worlds most admirable and effective Social Engineers said: "There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for."

Well, I wouldn't call them n00bs firstly... and secondly, most of the technically-savvy geeks/nerds I know read Slashdot and find out new and interesting stuff from here.

One of the best things about Slashdot is if you write something on here, ALOT of people will take notice. So if by providing solutions/information that people can read and take away to tell other non-technically-savvy individuals helps protect at least one person from being scammed, I'm more than happy to yell on Slashdot about it ;)

Don't have multiple tabs/windows open while you're doing your online banking!!!

Oh, and use NoScript!

Preaching to the converted here my friend...

I immediately thought of this topic when I was reading the BGP article and thinking about the implications of a hierarchal structure (incidentally, they can pretty much "disconnect" direct connections between eachother NOW if they want to... but of course we can route around it, if required - adding encryption/PKI doesn't make all that much of a difference if people don't enforce it).

See, Governments are still duking it out (Diplomatically and Militarily) while their populations talk to eachother on the net' - the wonderful thing about this is I can talk to you, not knowing if you're White, Black, Green, Yellow, Blue, Purple, Male, Female, American, French, Canadian, Belgian or Martian... if you call me an idiot, I can't say "You called me an idiot because I'm (insert racial/gender type here)", well, I CAN, but you can reply... "I didn't know that, but I still just think you're an idiot!".

The concept of a Worldwide Global Communications network with almost ubiquitous availability is something we really haven't had for along time, it's going to take the Governments of the world a bit of time to get their head around it... Personally I think the Politicians/Diplomats of the world should read The Truth by Terry Pratchett (if they haven't already), as it has alot of similar concepts regarding local, social, and geo-political issues in it, just with a different "new" Technology.