You can use pluggable transports to camouflage your traffic (they're already built into the Tor Browser, e.g. meek, snowflake, ...).
To get Tor in the first place in a censored/risky place you can get it from the official GetTorBrowser repository on Github: https://github.com/TheTorProject/gettorbrowser (There are additional links to GitLab, Archive.Org, Google Drive)
Also the length of the response, which is significantly more 'helpful', although probably not enough for a working attack unless you're willing to harrass a significant fraction of your intellectual workforce over false positives.
with or without downloading Tor I say its safe to assume everyone here is already under some kind of monitoring like we're all potential customers/criminals
Maybe in the west that'd be true- since we can freely trade information over the public internet, TOR doesn't have much utility. Let's say you're in a more totalitarian government that censors more information- TOR might look like a practical solution there, and might have people using it for more practical purposes.
He's right, it is a pretty big if, since storage space and compute power are basically free for NSA/CIA (and they have shown they don't care about privacy laws or the 4th amendment) you can safely assume all your traffic and data is stored away somewhere for future usage against you. If you're in Europe you are probably a bit safer.
