You're missing the point. There are court orders behind these "wiretaps".

"Warrantless wiretaps" refers to the program authorized by Bush in 2001 to do these wiretaps without ever notifying the FISA court.

What Obama was campaigning against in 2008 was the executive branch deciding what it could and could not do in regards to surveillance in secret without any input from the legislative or judicial branches.

What is being done now is under the FISA, an act passed by Congress and just re-authorized in 2012, and a law that the courts have upheld (at least, when they've allowed a lawsuit in the first place).

I am not defending the practice, but let's at least be strict about the terms we use. Surprisingly, no one in the government seems to mind a wiretap that has a warrant behind it.

The warrants seem rather broad though as they're receiving the information for everyone whereas warrants generally target specific individuals or organizations. This seems more like a technicality but still goes against the spirit of having warrants, kind of like a judge authorizing search and seizure of every American's home and the executives saying "well it's not warrantless because a judge said I could do this to anyone".

From the 4th Amendment, the warrants clause:

...and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"particularly" is typically understood to require particularity in the warrant. One cannot say "here is a search warrant for the Island of Manhattan, go catch the bad guys."

The argument here I think is that since pen registers typically require only reasonable suspicion, a warrant is not required anyway, so the fact that it doesn't look like a valid warrant to me is probably just intended to be for the benefit of the telco.

Not so. The program everyone's complaining about this week collects only metadata, but on fully domestic calls. The "warrantless wiretapping" program was targeted at actual content, but also at cases where one party was believed to be outside the United States. Of course, the Obama NSA has continued the latter program as well, under the statutory authority of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which Obama himself voted for as a Senator. You can claim they have "warrants" now, since the FISA court has issued a warrant approving the program, though not individual wiretaps.

I voted for Obama twice and can't say I've been universally impressed with his decisions. I look forward to seeing how the story develops. Everyone involved has denied that this is an accurate description of the program, but then again that is probably what you expect.

That being said, it does seem somewhat reasonable to me that the US is monitoring metadata about who is contacting who overseas. If you are making calls to and receiving calls from numbers originating in Afghanistan that appear on CIA lists of contacts associated with anti-American activity, that information should be used to get a warrant to listen to the content of those communications.

On the other hand, I would feel better about the surveillance state if there were some evidence that it was effective. In reality most of this surveillance is probably a waste of resources and potentially distracting to real law enforcement. Our rights are obviously already interpreted through a "prism" - it would be beneficial if people could make utilitarian assessments of these practices.

PRISM doesn't appear to cover phone calls. That's why these programs are arguably legal: its not illegal to collect metadata about phone calls, nor is it illegal as a general rule to collect things like web searches. Now, you can argue "there should be a law against that!" but as it stands there isn't.