it would be extremely naive to believe that certain corporations allied with the regime wouldn’t have complete, entire, total access to all of the traffic to feed their data collction.

VPNs are in no way secure. I'm sure they will be taking all your data and using it.

You are the product

It's a government program. The tax payer pays the service provider, a company owned by some government official's cousin. Monetization happened just before your employer paid you this week.

Let the NSA deal with that…