I'm not sure why an article that cites two US Court of Appeals judges with opposing views on the issue provides any indication of what the Supreme Court might do. Especially since the view for which the article is titled, which presumably is why you linked to it, is actually the judges view of what lawmakers should empower the NSA to do, not what is legal for the NSA to do under existing law. I'd certainly agree with the "don't hold your breath" sentiment for other reasons, but the article is a complete non-sequitur on the point.
I read that story yesterday, and I somewhat brushed it off as one judge's view. Thankfully that guy doesn't not sit on the Supreme Court, which is where all of this is headed.
I'm actually heartened by the unanimous decision this past summer where the SC ruled against the carte blanche searching of cell phones when the cops make an arrest. The Chief Justice wrote the opinion and came down hard on the government. He actually wrote "We cannot deny that our decision today will have an impact on the ability of law enforcement to combat crime...Privacy comes at a cost."
Ironically, I think that decision is actually quite technologically ignorant. The Court equates data in the cloud with local data while ignoring the massive legally relevant technical distinctions between the two kinds of storage.
Could you expand on how this non-distinction could lead to bad things for citizens?
Before a warrant, this non-distinction protects you, because this would be taken as a search of your personal effects.
If there's a search warrant, then the government has the powers to search your effects independent of where they are, so nothing's really changed and it aligns with the spirit of the law (instead of trying to hide behind technicalities).
The law is rooted in "[objectively] reasonable expectation of privacy." Someone who is technically ignorant can't see past the layer abstraction presented by the software: a file on cloud storage appears in the photo viewer alongside files on the local flash memory. But the technical reality is that cloud data is exposed to potentially hundreds of people at the ISP and service provider. Not only that, but potentially data-mined on top of that. Only if you're technologically ignorant of this fact could you reasonably expect that the data is really private.
Look at it this way. If your pot growing operation is visible from your neighbors window (just one person!) we say you can't reasonably expect privacy. Dillon v. Sup. Ct. How can we say data visible to your hundred closest sysadmin friends at CloudCo is private?