In conversations with The Washington Post over Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani's recent story on cellphone location tracking, an intelligence agency lawyer told Gellman, "obviously there is no Fourth Amendment expectation in communications metadata.” But some experts say it's far from obvious that the 1979 Supreme Court case on which the administration bases this view gives the government unfettered power to scoop up Americans' cellphone location data.

That Supreme Court case, called Smith v. Maryland, started with a 1976 robbery of a woman named Patricia McDonough in Baltimore. Soon afterward, she began receiving threatening calls from a man who identified himself as the robber. In one of those calls, the man on the line asked her to come outside, where she saw a 1975 Monte Carlo she had earlier described to the police drive by slowly.

The police spotted a man matching McDonough's description of the robber driving a 1975 Monte Carlo in her neighborhood later that month and traced the license plate to a Michael Lee Smith. Without getting a warrant, the police requested the telephone company install a pen register device to record the numbers dialed from Smith's home. The pen register revealed a call to McDonough, and Smith was arrested.

Smith argued that police violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy by failing to get a warrant for the pen register. But the Supreme Court disagreed with him. The high court ruled that the audio of the phone call is protected by the Fourth Amendment, but the numbers he dialed is not. Ever since then, law enforcement agencies have invoked Smith v. Maryland to argue that while the contents of communications enjoy Constitutional protection, "metadata" like phone numbers dialed does not. The NSA argues that the same ruling applies to location metadata.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/04/the-nsa-says-it-obviously-can-track-locations-without-a-warrant-thats-not-so-obvious/

But the surveillance of an individual suspect is nothing like the worldwide dragnet collecting data on billions of non-suspects.

The NSA program treats everyone as a suspect. How this is supposed to be legally defensible is beyond me.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of everything the NSA does but that's how it's 'legally defensible'.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Precision and concision. That's the game.[/center][/font][hr]

"I'm not saying I'm in favor of everything the NSA does." No one would know it with the way that you continuously jump into these threads and minimize, rationalize and explain how you think this is all perfectly legal, we all know this is happening, and we should just accept it.

That sounds like condoning to me.

how will they know where to aim the drones?

IP droning

hell, you just posted on a subversive website

because smart ones connect 40.000 times per hour with all kinds of adresses.

Given what we know now, it's no longer necessary to chip everybody to track us. We chipped ourselves, in order to text "i'm in the traffic jam" and to read Facebook on the toilet.

The only valid reason I can think of to have a mobile is to warn people in case of emergency.

I predict a boom in NSA-free technology, providers and services.

No wonder Feinstein keeps screaming about how many enemies America has. Apparently over 2/3rds of the planet are tarrarrists.

This shit would be laughable, if there weren't so much money and power behind it.

I wonder if that would work?

anyone who thinks some minor reforms are going to fix all of this are deluding themselves...