With due respect, "I had to turn on my VPN to read this article and post this comment" is overstating. I understand that you may feel like you should only read

With due respect, "I had to turn on my VPN to read this article and post this comment" is overstating. I understand that you may feel like you should only read/post with the aid of a VPN : However, having lived in the US for quite a while before arriving in SG, I think you're overestimating the reality of American's Freedom of Speech (for non-US persons). Both of us are foreign nationals w.r.t. the USA NSA. So they're legally free (under US law, as I understand it) to monitor, store and correlate all our communications (particularly since we're meeting at an end-point in the USA).