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.