I read the article and rejected its assertions as speculative horseshit, yes. What of it? The original document cites a figure (1862 petabytes) and two percentages (1.6% and 0.00004%) of that figure. The math is not hard.
The assertions in the article are not "speculative horseshit". In 2011, Netflix+Youtube+BitTorrent alone were over 50% of internet traffic [1], and all three have likely grown since then. The NSA has no interest in the vast majority of this traffic.
The exact numbers are speculative because nobody has data accurate enough to determine them with any real certainty, but the point is that the NSA is misleading the public about the extent of its surveilance by orders of magnitude.
Total internet traffic is not the total volume of communications. What you're saying is like saying that your county's prosecutor has a 0.25% conviction rate because 1% of residents are charged with crimes and 25% are found guilty. Measurements are useless if you measure the wrong thing.
The issue here is that only a tiny percentage of the information transmitted is of interest to someone doing surveilance.
No one cares about the data of the YouTube videos you watch, the content and images and JavaScript and CSS and what-have-you of the web pages you visit, the content of the files you download etc. Examples of what would be of interest, and only comprises a tiny portion of all web traffic, is
* All URLs you request (will include your search history)
* The contents and headers (and maybe attachments) of your e-mails
* Your online IM conversations
* _Concievably_ the video from your video calls, but this is too much data to store
* Arguably any data transmitted through a text form online
Again, the interesting data is only a tiny portion of all web traffic, because the rest is transmitted repeatedly and can be recreated on demand. Much of the interesting stuff is, in fact, in the "metadata".
