Two charged with attacks on four power substations in Washington state

[para bellum]

Uh oh, they used cell phone "data"? So they just went a fishing to see what they could catch?

Look at the timeframes. The FBI must have had access to the cell phone data in advance.

Vandalism happened on the 25th. It was reported to the FBI on the 26th. That same day, the FBI had identified the phones, and started following the suspects on the 27th.

There was not time to go to the providers- Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc, and collect the cell tower data, correlate and cross reference it, and pick out the two numbers that were at all 4 locations.

They must have all the data, from all the cell towers, stored in a common database. Only then could they just select the cell towers they want to query and get the results immediately.

Unrelated, I think about this time a few years back. My house was broken into, a Sig 9mm and a S&W .45LC were stolen along with a new Samsung Tablet. I thought "those dummies! that tablet can be tracked!"

Here I thought the thieves would be caught right away, but in fact no one was interested. I tracked their movement online for 3 days, from Portland all the way to the Canadian border. I knew where they were, but I couldn't get any police dept interested in catching them...