Curious how and why they were tracking this guy initially.
It seems like this would be the most difficult crime to prove.
Not against throwing the book at him if there is substantial proof.
It seems like this would be the most difficult crime to prove.
Not against throwing the book at him if there is substantial proof.
"A Forest Service fire investigator determined the Cascade Fire was likely the result of arson. He also noticed that on a dirt road 150 to 200 yards from the fire, a man was struggling to free his car, a black Kia Soul, after the vehicle's rear had failed to clear a partially buried boulder."
If you're going to be a wildlands arsonist, best to find the proper vehicle.
That's linking his car to the fire. That's from the article, I'm sure the affidavit itself has more.
Now that they have a warrant and can track his movements, he is coincident with several other fire origins.
Once he became a suspect to the level, a court order to get phone records would be easy.
The moment your phone is on, it is constantly keeping a full data handshake and connection to any base station nearby and to phone company switching computers. You are constantly "under surveillance" in a geographic sense if you have a cell phone turned on (with or without a valid SIM card - the phones serial number gets logged even if an account isn't validated). Having it this way is the only way an in-coming call could ever be routed to you!
Remember phone switches are all Unix based and they have log files constantly filling just like any desktop system. Literally just "grep" the files. The most amusing experience related to this I ever had was being able to talk to my uncle who was blue-collar AT&T technician. But he knew his Unix.
It's in the article.