Man seriously, in this topic you've only said that the police is honest, the government is honest, you have all the rights, they will never infringe those rights and everybody is equal.

you're american, you should know better. you, from all the civilized countries have the least rights.
I was actually laughing with a friend in december when in Frankfurt they had extra security checks for americans.
Anyhow, you are part of the country (free) which is the most controlled on the planet.

The police can track you down only using your IMEI, if they want to, even if you change the sim card they will know who to track, because they can chose from IMEI and phone number. Do they abuse it? hell yea, I know thousand of chases. I even abused the system asking a friend to track down someone, and my friend is at the low end of the chain of command. I won't go into details since it would be stupid of me to do that, as it's illegal, as there is no prof.
I know cases in the news paper when the police tracked down criminals from their IMEI as they used to swipe simcards very often.
I even found to buy a tracker, and device listener (exactly as said before to listen to the conversations), but it was too expensive for me (10000euros). It's not illegal to sell it, but it's illegal to own it.

Stop trusting everything they say about privacy, law, only court order. Everybody has his price, and if you find someone who's too expensive, go to his colleague, he will be cheaper.