Which was the motivation behind "The Patriot Act"... Which enough people have come wise to (and the stink attached to it) that legislation renamed it "The Freedom Act". Nothing could be further from the truth!
The TOR network has existed for a lot longer and demonstrated considerable robustness. I doubt anyone who knows anything about security would use an off the shelf product from a company (who is beholden to storage laws) based in America. Asymmetric encryption gives a pretty good "anonymous internet" feel if you use it correctly. You must be careful there though too because certain encryption algorithm implementations are known to have backdoors. This leaves a lot to be desired. Like how generally NSA intercepts are targeted and they can only store around 48 hours of "total US data" before having to purge their system. Being targeted means your data is stored a lot longer (all of this is known from the Snowden leaks). Again, they are also beholden to American law. This article doesn't even talk about the "Five Eyes" Agreements that enable complete and total surveillance of all citizens. Some real clickbaity garbage if you ask me. The situation is infinitely more complicated than they give here.
I only really trade and watch legal over aged porn, so not really worried!! Torrent Films, but can't do you for that in the UK yet, so all good.
It's soooo much data, unless you do something ie bomb making ?? Pedo ?? that gets flagged and gets them to proper study your logs, then they have your data, but nobody is looking at you.