Free software can't save us:

"The Chinese government runs the Great Firewall using primarily technologies," writes Samatman on Ycombinator, but it's not clear which open source technology he's referring to. "Free software on phones? If anyone can sideload whatever they want onto any platform they want, it's the Chinese. How does this help you, when the cellphone towers are tracking your phone's every movement, and when attempts to evade that tracking are sufficient to get you arrested or worse? The nature of the license for the software running on a radio has nothing to do with the ability to triangulate that radio, sadly."

Figs on Ycombinator adds, "Wouldn't you also need 'free hardware' to avoid the risk of your device being used against you? If you're not willing to trust the software on your phone, why would you trust that there isn't a tracking device built directly into the chips on the phone?"

Another Ycombinator reader puts partial trust in open source, however, saying "Without a completely open stack, you cannot really know what airplane mode does."

On Fark, reader Dangl1ng writes, "Sure, you can have a PC running 100% not-just-open-source-but-GPL'd software and it can surf the web, send e-mail, store your images, maybe even print to certain brands of printers or halfway kinda-sorta utilize your NVIDIA GPU. That's great. But it doesn't achieve anything politically. It doesn't change any landscape."