This is almost enough for me to want to get rid of my cell phone

Didn't the Dems get upset about being able to check the history of use of public computers in public libraries? Didn't the Dems get all excised about the rights of foreigners? Both cases involving terrorism. Now the Dems want to use our cell phone records for common law enforcement in non-terrorism cases!
Obama wants to be able for the government to get this cell phone tracking data without a search warrant. All the government as to do is go fishing for what people were nearby when a certain crime occurred. Possibly we should just let government go into people's personal files to see if they can find info on whether you committed a crime. Can you make a contract with your cell phone provider that you expect privacy? Tracking an enemy in a war might be one thing, but these guys are going even farther in civilian affairs.

Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.
In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that "a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records" that show where a mobile device placed and received calls. . . .
U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Lenihan in Pennsylvania denied the Justice Department's attempt to obtain stored location data without a search warrant; prosecutors had invoked a different legal procedure. Lenihan's ruling, in effect, would require police to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause--a more privacy-protective standard. . . .
The Obama administration is not alone in making this argument. U.S. District Judge William Pauley, a Clinton appointee in New York, wrote in a 2009 opinion that a defendant in a drug trafficking case, Jose Navas, "did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the cell phone" location. That's because Navas only used the cell phone "on public thoroughfares en route from California to New York" and "if Navas intended to keep the cell phone's location private, he simply could have turned it off." . . .

This Clinton nominee didn't get this right. My understanding is that you have to actually remove the battery from the cell phone to protect yourself. Some cell phones won't let you remove the battery.