I'd absolutely bet on it. Short of outlawing encryption such a thing is flat out impossible, even then it's questionable due to steganography. And both of these ignore the fact that, and I want to repeat this for emphasis; These People Are Very Stupid (If You Want To Be Charitable You May Add "In-This-Area" Here).
Well, there had been laws treating encryption as weaponry, and forbidding it's export. So outlawing it for such uses, is not that far fetched. We've regressed a lot in a lot of areas since the nineties.
OTOH, VPNs are needed by companies of course, so they can't outlaw this kind of use. But it's not like they cannot poison usenet/tor et al, and catch guys this way. If they have their way, one can imagine a future that you're only allowed to VPN to a whitelist of addresses that you have declared beforehand for business use --or something of that kind.
Also, how about any "odd" pattern, like repeated high volume traffic, giving them "probable cause" to bust into your house and check for illegal downloads?
Attacks to expose your identity via tor already exist and there are accepted methods to avoid them, no default route etc so even if something you are running does manage to try to initiate a remote connection it will not get anywhere anyway.
Usenet is already a haven of scum and villainy as the saying goes due to being commonly used as a vector to distribute malware, people that are accustomed to this environment once again take plenty of precautions to reduce their exposure to these attacks. Another agency joining in on the poison would just be par for the course for our theoretical target.
The idea that a person would go to this extent to avoid detection and then not use deniable encryption volumes to stow their black data is somewhat crazy, even if you grant that someone downloading high volumes of data for illicit purposes is distinguishable on a probable cause basis from someone who just really loves watching a lot of online video or uses a high volume update channel operating system or runs a bunch of computers behind a single ip etc.
This really is asymmetric warfare terrain highly favouring the policed rather than the policing entity if you assume infinitely competent actors on both sides
