I see this take a lot. Serious question: doesn't the U.S. government surveillance program focus on collecting communication metadata for U.S. citizens? While it isn't clear what that metadata includes, we do have examples of past programs that have leaked (and the legal theory used to justify them) to guide us.

Given what we publicly know about these surveillance programs I could see FISC approving bulk metadata collection for the IPv4 header content, insecure HTTP header content, and DNS queries.

Wouldn't using a VPN, DNS over HTTPS, and HTTPS everywhere shield you from these bulk metadata collection programs? I run https://everytwoyears.org, a political non-profit focused on ending these programs, and I view VPNs as a key technical piece of preventing these metadata collection programs from functioning; if the security community doesn't believe they are effective, I would really like to know!

Another way of saying this: collecting _content_ of a communication requires a warrant (and our mass surveillance programs respect that from what we publicly know). Most people that I know aren't trying to avoid active (we have a warrant to search you) monitoring with a VPN, but trying to avoid passive warrantless monitoring. Obscuring communication metadata through encryption and tunneling seems to be an effective way of doing this.