In the Guardian piece it says, “One US senator has claimed that soon after the attack, NSA received a call from a US cell phone to a “suspected bin Laden operative in Europe” announcing: “We hit the targets.”

I have heard it mentioned at least 50 times from many sources that a Senator spoke out about out abiity to track cell phone traffic but no one ever says which Senator let this classified info out. Does anyone know which one it was?

No. That tidbit was originally what drew me to the article, though.

Tracking shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who has ever read anything about signal intelligence. Radio direction finding (RDF) was a critically important — and well known — tool in World War II. Even without knowing current techniques, one would have to assume that they have improved since then! So I don’t think the leak matters much in this instance. UBL certainly has some help from Iraqi intel people, and they would be bound to know the state of the art.

Besides, SIGINT innovations like this are old news to readers of Tom Clancy.