Plus I have never understood why people assumed it was safe from the government. You are making a credit card transaction with your name on it and associate it with a named account! You never know who is behind a VPN company. If I were a state censor I'd make sure to have several cheap and reliable VPNs accessible to the locals and just make a list of what they are doing with it.

I was answering to Iv comment that people in Iran will find Tor. That's not the case from my experience while I was traveling in Iran last year. People simply use free VPNs.