Police are using phone tracking software without acquiring warrant's.

Police records show many departments struggling to abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.
   
In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.
In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.
In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.
The New York Times reports that the Iowa City Police Department warned officers in a training manual not to "mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject,” and even to keep them out of police reports.

And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment.
Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect, records show.
Many departments try to keep cell tracking secret, the documents show, because of possible backlash from the public and legal problems. Although there is no evidence that the police have listened to phone calls without warrants, some defense lawyers have challenged other kinds of evidence gained through warrantless cell tracking. 

Do not mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject,” the Iowa City Police Department warned officers in one training manual. It should also be kept out of police reports, it advised.

In Nevada, a training manual warned officers that using cell tracing to locate someone without a warrant “IS ONLY AUTHORIZED FOR LIFE-THREATENING EMERGENCIES!!” The practice, it said, had been “misused” in some standard investigations to collect information the police did not have the authority to collect.

Thirty-five ACLU affiliates helped file over 380 public records requests, and they received over 5,500 pages of documents in response from over 200 local law enforcement agencies. Despite the invasive nature of cell tracking, “only a tiny minority”—10 agencies total—consistently obtained a warrant before tracking someone through their cellphone.

Among other things, the government maintains Americans have no expectation of privacy of such cell-site records because they are “in the possession of a third party” (.pdf) — the mobile phone companies. What’s more, the authorities maintain that the cell site data is not as precise as GPS tracking and, “there is no trespass or physical intrusion on a customer’s cellphone when the government obtains historical cell-site records from a provider.”http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/us/police-tracking-of-cellphones-raises-privacy-fears.html?_r=1&goback=%2Egmp_1829117%2Egde_1829117_member_104871581

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/many-us-police-use-cell-phones-to-track-study.aspx?pageID=238&nID=17472&NewsCatID=358

Nationwide Cell Phone Tracking Public Records Request: Findings and Analysis ACLU pdf. http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/cell_phone_tracking_documents_-_final.pdf


KingFish Dual-Mode system price list.

The following price list for Harris Corporation wireless surveillance products was included in contract documentation for the purchase of multiple KingFish Dual Mode wireless measurement systems that went to Maricopa County, Arizona. This contract was pointed out by Jacob Appelbaum in August 2011, yet Maricopa County responded to the ACLU’s recent information requests by stating that it does not have a wireless tracking program.http://info.publicintelligence.net/Harris-WPG-2010.pdfTraining Manuals For Tracking Cellphones:http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/329943/cell-phone-training-materials.pdf