How Three Alleged Tesla Vandals Got Caught

Federal law enforcement agencies have turned to a variety of techniques and surveillance capabilities to identify people who have allegedly set fire to Tesla vehicles and property, including automatic license plate readers and social media crawling, according to newly unsealed court records obtained by 404 Media.

The documents come from cases that Attorney General Pamela Bondi announced on Thursday. The charges also come as sentiment towards Tesla and Elon Musk is at an all time low. People have participated in regular, and largely non-violent, “Tesla Takedown” protests, and there have been multiple acts of vandalism around the country, which has captured the attention of Musk, Bondi, and Donald Trump, who are now all claiming that vandalizing Teslas will be treated as an act of domestic terrorism. On Monday 404 Media reported that a website called Dogequest had doxed some Tesla owners, and that the website included a Molotov cocktail as its cursor. 

Each of the arrests announced by Bondi happened earlier this month or last month, and new details about them are now available in court documents obtained by 404 Media. Details about the surveillance techniques used to identify the alleged vandals show that police used a combination of automatic license plate readers and social media monitoring to investigate two of the crimes. In the third, the suspect was identified based on a combination of license plate records and fingerprints left on a Molotov cocktail bottle.

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