Read you EULA for your ISP, it pretty much stated on everyone that I have ever seen that the ISP is allowed to monitor your traffic. So knowing that why is anyone suprised that the NSA may be? Wake up people, ready your ISP EULA and nothing should be of suprise. :-)

Traffic is also routed through the internet on different routes. Some packets may travel over AT&T circuits, some over Level3 and so on. I do not fully believe everythign I have read on this post and think its probably someones interpritation of what they are seeing.

Nice theory :-)