[A.J.Armitage]

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.

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.

[Southack]

"these aren't FBI investogators looking, so it's not the same thing."

With sniffers on the internet, you've got a broad spectrum of people including technical personnel who just happen to be FBI, as well as techies in every other company, all watching the plain text data traffic for diagnostic purposes as it crosses problem areas of their equipment.

Why would you call viewing plain text data packets different for one group or another?