You're carrying an always on, full featured tracking device complete with GPS, audio, video, accelerometer and signal scanner in your pocket. Seriously, your smartphone would give George Orwell nightmares.

What he's talking about is SS7 hijacking. SS7 is the raw protocol available at the carrier level. NSA has been on that thing like a hooker on a politician since at least the mid 1990s. When I worked for AT&T Wireless Services in the first part of this century, everything he talks about was already in place and regularly used. It's not a rumor, every MDN has been under constant capture since at least 1999. Tracking a missing person by pulling their tower ping history and performing triangulation used to be in my job description.

You've already been "spied upon", numerous times. For example, Verizon will man in the middle your https connections, just to inject a "super cookie" for advertising purposes. AT&T has every bit of data your phone has ever generated going back to PacBell days, possibly earlier, but the longest log I ever saw had a start date of 1996. Don't even get me started on Google and Apple.

What he's talking about is important, but if you've got something to hide, there are bigger security issues than you're worrying about right now. My advice is don't do anything illegal with your phone at all and stay away from "darknets" on it, i.e. don't mess around with Tor, I2P etc. Do that and you'll get lost in the crowd, unless someone is actively seeking you.

Factually speaking, you're already in "the system", but the volume of data being collected is too voluminous for real time analysis. Echelon developed a backlog of 30 mins way back in 2001. I can only imagine that has gotten much worse since the volume of data being collected has increased at a rate "exceeding exponential". At this point our entire intelligence apparatus is mostly just a pork project for Booz Allen Hamilton. Even if you're someone they should be looking at, odds are that most likely they aren't. But you do have records.