This is from Wiki, so I guess you can take it or leave it:
A threshold question in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is whether a search has occurred. If no search occurred, then the Fourth Amendment does not apply.
In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the Supreme Court ruled that a search occurs when 1) a person expects privacy in the thing searched and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable.
In Katz, the Supreme Court ruled that a search had occurred when the government wiretapped a telephone booth.[22] The Court’s reasoning was that 1) Charles Katz expected that his phonebooth conversation would not be broadcast to the wider world and 2) society believes that expectation is reasonable.
In United States v. Jones, 565 U. S. ____ (2012), the Supreme Court ruled that, in addition to the Katz standard, a search occurs when law enforcement trespasses on the searched person’s property. In Jones, law enforcement officers had attached a GPS device on a car’s exterior without Antoine Jones’s consent. The Court concluded that Jones was a bailee to the car, because the car’s owner had regularly permitted him to use the car, and so had a property interest in the car.[23]
I would say that under the Katz precedent (case law I guess) all telephone conversations would start out with the expectation of privacy and also the general consensus that it would be unreasonable to drag a wide net across all telecom as is asserted here and severally in the last few weeks. I mean if there’s an expectation of privacy when using a telephone booth, then the barrier would be higher when using a personal telephone or wireless device (e.g. a cell phone).
apparantly the FISA Court “bulk data” Warrants are what Bush, Obama and the NSA think cover the 4th Amendment requirements; with the FISA court on the judiciary side making a judicial agreement that “reasonable” and “probable cause” are satisfied and sufficent for issuing their Warrant
if that’s the case, we need to legislate new requirements for the FISA court