Can You Hear Me Now?

This piece from The Guardian last week discusses growing popular support for the use of surveillance technologies, as well as a little feature of your friendly cell phone I hadn't been aware of:

Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by "triangulating" the signals from three base stations, but—according to a report in the Financial Times—the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call.