Sure but how is that responsive to parent's point about Mansoor being an "outlier in taking precautions"? The reason he found out about the previous attacks was likely because he took similar precautions:
"When Ahmed Mansoor opened the document, his suspicions were aroused due to garbled text displayed. His email account was later accessed from the following suspicious IPs.."
Then again, he's not some comfortable first-world programmer who makes $100K a year and enjoys talking about infosec and opsec as a fun diversion, he's a guy living in a repressive third-world dictatorship who has put his entire life on the line for the human rights of others and probably has little to no computer science or infosec education, so, maybe cut the guy some fucking slack.
"When Ahmed Mansoor opened the document, his suspicions were aroused due to garbled text displayed. His email account was later accessed from the following suspicious IPs.."
https://citizenlab.org/2012/10/backdoors-are-forever-hacking...