Which is why the U.S. government routes a copy of the traffic through servers hosted in a friendly ally's country, then do whatever you want with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYNXVgYhPOc&feature=emb_logo

General Alexander was very precise in his choice of words when he repeatedly stated "in the United States". What went unasked was whether these operations take-place against U.S. citizens outside of the borders of the United States.

And even then he was lying. They had tapped google's inter datacenter connections for instance.

"not wittingly" /s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsmo0hUWJ08

Plus even when they do need a warrant, it doesn't do much good when there is literally a closed-access secret court specifically for handling surveillance requests which very rarely denies said requests and has a known history of enabling abuse.

The dragnet surveillance apparati searching through all your communications have warrants to do so? Certainly not. They redefined what "search" means so that it's only a search if the dragnet finds something and an analyst retrieves it. This loophole lets them conduct searches with complete disregard for the 4th amendment.

So long as the courts entertain the loophole, it's more accurate to say that searches do not require a warrant than to say that they do.