Since we are in hypothetical conjecture land, I'll give a guess: My guess is that the code was originally written for a completely different purpose. When they

Since we are in hypothetical conjecture land, I'll give a guess: My guess is that the code was originally written for a completely different purpose. When they decided to start gather wifi data, somebody said, "Hey, I think Bob wrote something like that. Maybe we can use it." Next came a quick rush to get the thing into their street view cars without doing a deep analysis on the code. And, yes, wiretapping without a search warrant. Electronic communications don't generally fall under the same laws as far as I know (IANAL!).