Edward Snowden might have exploited the status of having a low profile (i.e.
not being singled out) by then.
I would estimate that 99.9999% of the people have a lower profile than a NSA
contractor with top-level permissions! For those people, GPG on a free
software operating system (such as Trisquel) is apparently sufficient or more
than sufficient.
Even if GPG is not necessary, given somebody's threat model, using it helps
those who really need it (whistle-blowers, political dissidents, etc.):
using GPG would not raise a flag (assuming it still does), if the vast
majority of GPG users only encrypt uninteresting messages;
to the best of our knowledge, even the most powerful agencies can only afford
the computing power to decrypt a tiny number of such messages (probably
uninteresting ones given the previous point), if good-enough ciphers are
used.
