What I can do, however, is take measures to protect myself against less powerful or sophisticated attackers.
Where I come from, “communications metadata” is required to be kept by all telcos and isps. This metadata is them “available to law enforcement” - which is not just investigations into child abuse and drug running, as the proponents of the laws made out when advocating for them, but includes agencies such as the Taxi commission, various local councils, and state fisheries departments.
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2018/11/14/comms_alliance_me...
Using (trusted) vpns and e2e encrypted messaging will reduce the chance of a local council or a fisheries inspector being able to get as much information from my metadata as they might from non VPN and secure messaging using people.
(Of course, it might backfire and just paint a big target on my back... One potential privacy advantage of COVID and widespread wfh is that many many more people are using VPN tunnels for ordinary and mundane purposes. Adding extra hay to the haystack my needle is trying to hide in is a good thing. So long as it’s not Mossad looking for my specific needle...)
But my main point is that most people are afraid of large organizations of terrorists or bad actors will be able to discuss things without the ability for the FBI to surveil them. Well you can't have "large" and "vet everyone to an extremely high degree." Sure, this will make it more difficult to stop small groups, but those have been notoriously difficult to find and stop in the first place.