[Edit] Consider if it were the [redacted] government looking for people to have leverage over in the future in their target country.
Are you trying to torrent without being banned by your ISP, or even to do some mildly illegal stuff such as buying drugs, hate speech or hacking some irrelevant company? The VPN is probably fine. NSA aren't going to risk giving up their backdoor for something trivial
Planning to run an international terrorism ring aimed at taking down western governments? I certainly wouldn't trust a VPN for that.
With innocuous taps in place, most of the employees of the VPN service could even be kept in the dark about its true purpose.
Reminds me of Crypto AG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
It's a sad state of affair, but seems unavoidable. Being truly anonymous is extremely difficult. Being anonymous to a selective set of entities is easier, if you aren't a targeted subject of their interest.
Not specifically and not today, but they are collecting and archiving data just in case they do find me interesting in the future.
While it's less likely that some foreign power will ever find me interesting.
Telling people to use a VPN as an easy fix for privacy makes their privacy worse. They need to look into and understand how to make their traffic secure, how DNS works, how to use proper encryption, etc. There sadly isn't a simple fix, just like with most things in life. What you do with a commercial VPN is give control over your traffic into the hands of some completely unknown and often very dodgy looking business. One that, like you and others noted, might not even be a business at all.
Just that they have less reason to find anything about me interesting than the USA does since I live in the USA.
What you do with a commercial VPN is give control over your traffic into the hands of some completely unknown and often very dodgy looking business.
As opposed to my ISP, who has only my best interests in mind?