It may be vandalism, but if the power company doesn’t press charges, there won’t be a prosecution. That’s the real world. If prosecuted, the defendants would have discovery available to see if the feds had access to the video. If so, it gets REAL interesting.
Those cameras are there for FERC compliance. That’s federal.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=FERC+substation+camera+requirements
You’re really looking way too much into this. You haven’t an idea how many people would be involved for fedzilla to get access to those camera’s. It is not something that could be kept quiet without a bonafide warrant. I’m telling you, with the amount of stress these companies are under to transition to the new regulations, they have zero cycles to be playing cat and mouse with those idiots and breaking TONs of standards/practices just to let the fed into their system to view a few cameras. It would just be easier for the fed to stash go-pro’s in the treeline (and probably more effective).