In a nutshell, Edward Snowden disclosed that the US government, and multiple allied governments had the ability to eavesdrop on everyone's phone calls, read their text messages, emails, internet searches, track their locations (via GPS in phones) and also remotely activate people's cell phone cameras and microphones to listen and see what people are doing in real time.
Based on these disclosures, it is estimated that the US and its allies have visibility into roughly 80% of all digital communications in the US.
None of these federal agencies should have been doing this to U.S. citizens, on US soil and that the mechanism exploited to achieve this panoptic surveillance capability was cooperation by the Level 3 Internet carriers. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint etc, were providing the "keys" to their networks to the government to provide this access.
The government is not supposed to take your data wothout a warrant but a private company can give it to them in circumvention of the 4th amendment. The real issue here is NOT whether a company will give your data to the govt with or without a warrant.
One thing you should be aware of is that this framing of the debate is pushed by the government because it favors their position. However, the real fight we should be focused on is not whether a warrant has been served, rather, it should be focused on WHO the warrant is being served upon.
Consider the mail as an example. If I send you a package that the governmentt wants to snoop on, they cannot serve a warrant on the mail carrier in possession of the package to get access to it (even if it's a private company like UPS, FedEx, etc). That's because the laws about mail were passed long before the Patriot Act when the government still respected the rights of citizens. US mail actually can be subject to search warrant. It appears that the warrant is served on the mail facility and not the sender or recipient (see page 31), HOWEVER, it must be a federal warrant.
Second, it seems pretty clear that these cases are almost entirely restricted to investigations of cases involving the mail itself, such as mail fraud ... this means that this pertains the sender abusing the mail, not the recipient. One's digital data should be treated more like the recipient of mail since the analogy of your digital data is more like you storing things in a lock box in your house. (Recipients of mail generally cannot be prosecuted until they take possession of the mail, obviating this entire issue.)
It should work the same way with your data. If the government wants my info from Twitter, they should be compelled to serve warrants on BOTH Twitter AND me. We should BOTH have the opportunity to inspect the warrant, fight it, etc.
The reason is that the amount of leverage the government has over companies is very high because like Joe Nacchio learned in 2009 - a company has a huge attack surface across a huge array of different facets while the cost of caving to government surveillance demands is relatively small.
For you, though, if your freedom is at risk, there's nothing else exposed for the government to leverage to get you to do what they want. They're already going after everything. So even companies like Google that vigorously defend warrants would have a tough time fighting the government on something the government really wanted to get because there's so much the government can do to strong arm them.
And then of course, most companies don't have the resources to mount a defense like Google could on your behalf, even if they wanted to. There are vanishingly few civically-minded companies that even want to. No one has an interest in protecting your data more than you do, so you should get a warrant just like the mail.
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