In this case, that might not be necessary.

Microsoft invented AJAX in 1999 to be used with Outlook Web Access.

Not really. Consider the length of time any one person is tracked is 60 days. You will be making multiple requests for this person's position every hour. Let's say you make 4 requests per hour (one every 15 minutes). In one day you will have already made 96 requests for this one person alone. By 60 days you will have made 5,760 requests. Divided into a little over 8 million requests in 12 months, you have only tracked about 1390 people in a year's time. This is not unrealistic and certainly not horribly 1984ish, although TFA is clearly written to make you think so.

Of course, it's also entirely possible that investigators would prefer a more accurate tracking of a person's movements. Let's say you make 20 requests per hour (one every 3 minutes). You get 480 requests per day over 60 days, meaning 28,800 requests per person. This works out to only 277 people in 12 months.

The actual number of people tracked is probably somewhere between the above results, and finding out that police were able to accurately track a few hundred people's movements in a 12 month period isn't really very exciting.

Even without overriding the "911 only" setting, it is entirely possible to accurately determine a phone's location within a cell to within several hundred meters (see Shakrai's post below). Having location services enabled on the handset only makes the process a little easier.