Your premise is fatally flawed. When you hook up a sniffer to view data traffic, the humans involved can see ALL of the data in those packets in plain text, and they are certainly not the intended recipients of those messages. Another flaw in your reasoning is the human versus machine difference. Once you let machines read or record data traffic, the genie is out of the bottle. An analogy to what you are claiming would be letting a machine tape record a phone conversation be legal so long as no person was allowed to listen to the tape. The flaw in that position is that there is no law preventing an American from listening to a tape. Once the tape is recorded, the genie is out of the bottle. The same holds true for letting other machines read data traffic. Once the machine has been permitted access, the genie is loose. You can't go stop a human from looking at the data on their own machine, after all.
I hope that helps.
First, I want sources. Second, these aren't FBI investogators looking, so it's not the same thing.
Another flaw in your reasoning is the human versus machine difference.
LOL
Once you let machines read or record data traffic, the genie is out of the bottle. An analogy to what you are claiming would be letting a machine tape record a phone conversation be legal so long as no person was allowed to listen to the tape.
No, your argument is like saying that since the phone wires "listen" to conversations, humans in general and federal investigators in particular can too.