And it gets way worse...

In order to tolerate when those routers go down, those requests can be sent to many different routers, potentially. One router might be a backup in case the other router is experiencing heavy traffic, for instance. If an attacker has compromised one router, he can target messages by simply flooding the other router with fake traffic. That's just one of many, many ways. Some of them are even scarier.

Because of the voluntary nature of encryption use, anyone can do this, not just state actors like the US Government or the NSA.

It also means that you only need to compromise a fraction of the routers on the internet to compromise nearly all the traffic on the internet.