Some commenters pointed to previous about FBI surveillance teams eavesdropping on cell phone conversations, and a new program in Beijing to .

"Remember the article on government snooping while the phone's turned off? The fact that cell phones can and do track you is blindingly true, but for some reason, people don't even want to hear it," the reader Compaqt said.

"This isn't paranoia," on Reddit. "There are established precedents. The power is there and the legislation is in place to use it without oversight in terms of roving wiretaps and national security letters. The abuses of these tools by the FBI are widely documented by the ACLU. Dismissing it offhand as silly or too inconvenient to think about is not very rational."

Stallman asks the public "to take extreme measures against threats which seem both unlikely and dystopian," but he often turns out to be right, on Ycombinator, who writes that Stallman foresaw problems with digital rights management. "I've noticed, over the years, that Stallman's most paranoid fears tend to come partially true. So I no longer automatically discount what Stallman says, because his pessimistic predictions have a better track record than my optimistic ones."

A commenter on the Network World site noted that cell phones aren't the only devices to worry about: cars and home appliances include software and powerful computer chips as well.