...because they don't need a warrant. A warrant is needed when the state wants to use its monopoly on violence to obtain evidence (eg. sending men with guns to search your house). It's not needed when someone volunteers the information (eg. asking your friends what they saw when they last visited).
"Such records can identify Americans who are seeking help from a suicide hotline or a hotline for survivors of sexual assault or domestic abuse,"
Anyone have a good hypothesis about why the NSA would want this specific data? Only good thing I can think of is to look for folks in their ranks who are at risk of being compromised.
They have a history of looking at things like this and cross referencing the data points with known protestors or online figureheads to build files against them. It makes it easier to dismiss a case when you can build a narrative that someone is mentally unwell or biased, or to incite action by making them out to be a threat. The protesters against Atlanta's Cop City who were charged with RICO violations had such a case built against them by using their communications on social media for example.
