I suspect that they just go ahead and bug anyone anywhere that they want. Only when they need to bring something out in the open do they go get a warrant. So they might not have bothered to get one.
Excellent point!
We need to be able to think like you do - which is to say like they do. If we approach this in terms of “how would an honest person get this done”, we miss things like this. If we approach it in terms of “how would I behave if I were a liberal, if the *rules* didn’t apply to me” then we can get a better idea of how they operated and continue to operate.
Yours is an important post. (Please post similarly wherever/whenever relevant so that more of us will catch on!)