If LE trace up to an access point that you are no longer using, and it has only your spoofed MAC address, the trace is essentially dead. They will never directly tie that connection to you, in the vast majority of cases. The problem is that if the police have traced up to your neighbors house, it is very simple for them to set up shop with spectrum analyzers. While you are connected to a hotspot you send and receive signals. Receive is fine and cannot be traced, send is where the problem is. Something that is sending a WiFi signal can be pinpointed very quickly with the right equipment. When the thing stops transmitting a signal, the trace can no longer continue. So if you use a random persons internet from a park that you go to one time with a spoofed mac address, and you leave before the cops come, not even the NSA is likely going to be able to determine that *you* are the one who used the access point at the time it comes into question. If you set up shop in the park for months on end, or get in any sort of pattern, that is where the attacks come from. If you always use your neighbors internet for illegal shit, yeah the trace will first go to your neigbhor but it will only be a short amount of time before it goes to you from there. Another thing is that even if the trace is at a technical dead end, there are other things to take into consideration. Perhaps the trace goes to a hotel, from that point on it is dead, it could have been anyone at the hotel at that time. Okay, but then you have this same thing happen to five different hotels, and now the FBI does an intersection attack of the people registered at the hotels at that time and your name pops out. they didn't technically trace you but they did trace up to the hotel that you were at multiple times, and saw you are by far the most likely suspect (I guess you should have registered the room with a new fake ID each time, preferably not from celtic !).