WaPo: The NSA says it ‘obviously’ can track locations without a warrant. That’s not so obvious

The NSA says it ‘obviously’ can track locations without a warrant. That’s not so obvious by Andrea Peterson:

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.