[rl3]

If you're a US citizen, perhaps not. NSA has open season for anything that isn't in the U.S. They can bring their full offensive capability to bear on foreign targets and largely do whatever the hell they want.

Domestic? Not as much. It becomes more of a legal/NSL game then. Granted, I'm sure GCHQ can (and does) compromise U.S. VPN providers.

Obviously it's far more complex than that, but if you're a U.S. citizen using a US-based service, there are some protections afforded.

On the other hand, I tend to believe Russ Tice when he says NSA conducts full-take domestic collection, so the aforementioned protections are largely data minimization practices, and thus they already have all your data.

Of course, Obama significantly weakened those protections prior to leaving office, as well as increasing the scope of NSA's sharing to include a disturbing amount of federal law enforcement agencies.