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1/ This is a good example of how journalists like @bmelley wildly distort cybersecurity/hacking facts in order to create a story. "Tracking software" is not something that exists, "tracking images" do, but they don't have the importance the story ascribes to them.
2/ When emails arrive formatted with HTML, the images displayed can be included in the email itself, or loaded externally from servers, aka "remote content". When loaded remotely from servers, the servers can track when you open the emails, of course.
3/ Such tracking images are used everywhere where somebody blasts out emails -- such as political campaigns. I donate $5 to a wide variety of political campaigns to track their tracking. Here is a good example from AOC. 
4/ As you can see in this image, Thunderbird, like most email programs, is by default configured to not load "remote content". Thus, at the bottom of the email, we see a broken image icon, because it can't load the image.
5/ You can "view source" any email to see what the HTML is actually doing. The way it works is that it used HTML <img src="...tracking-image?unique-id"> to load the image. In this example email, the tracking image is the following (with some of the unique-ID redacted).
6/ Does this trigger Fourth Amendment concerns? I can't see how, but I'd be interested in @orinkerr's comments on this.
7/ In the past, those like Orin have written about the FBI's "NIT" malware which indeed is "tracking software", using an 0day exploit to run code on a target computer in order to discover the user's hidden identity.
8/ If that's what happened in the above story, then it would be an explosive story. For one thing, how would the DoJ get their hands on 0day exploits?
