I'm working on an unrelated piece this evening, so briefly: I don't know if my 2006 article fueled conspiracies. I assume that Glenn's pieces on the NSA for the Guardian moved the needle far more in that direction, but nevertheless they're good pieces that should have been written (even if I quibble with his presentation).

I cast around for a followup a year or so after the original article ran but didn't have enough to warrant a second story. In terms of remote activation of microphone, that also could be done with malware without any company's participation, which is what today's WSJ piece suggests. Re: the WashPost piece, I saw it too. I speculated via Twitter at the time that it could be referring to last cell tower pinged.