The police say that over the weekend, officers found the poles the cameras were mounted on had been cut down and the cameras were gone. Flock cameras are stirring controversy across the country as they compile license plate and other vehicle details in a national database.
Your character would get caught. Mainly because electronics boards are absolutely covered in parts made from all over the world. Each one of those parts is batch numbered, if not labeled with a serial number. If your main character wasn’t caught from being the only person with a purchase history that matches the equipment used, they would certainly be caught using forensic analysis of the identifying marks on the devices.
Your character’s best bet is to realize that the point of sabotage is not to destroy a resource, (complete destruction is a bonus), but to make the opponent either realize that they would need to commit more effort to protect that resource than it is worth, or get your opponent to commit that effort, wasting their time and resources.
Real life example : Ukraine blew up part of a useful bridge in Crimea with a truck bomb. The bridge has been restored to working order, but now Russia has to check every single truck that goes over the bridge very thoroughly. They’ve limited the maximum size of the trucks as well. The total flow of material over that bridge had been choked, and Russia is doing all the work to choke out their own asset, and they will need to continue to do this for the rest of the conflict, or the bridge will get blown up again.
So, back to your fictional character… He doesn’t need to devise a sophisticated attack to destroy all the cameras, he just needs to be part of an ongoing uncoordinated campaign of random attacks. Either the camera owners step up hardening their devices, which increases the cost and decreases the number they can deploy, and their usefulness, or, the government entities that use the cameras will need to deploy more police presence to protect the cameras, invalidating the benefit of having the cameras anyway.
You are absolutely correct in all you said! And you also made several assumptions about the character actions; some considered already and some most illuminating! Thank you for improving my fiction!
Though the goal of the character isn’t at all the destruction of a resource. It is the simple and timely denial of access of the story’s antagonist to their tooling, at a time when they expected it to be working. Like during a bean counting competition at the country fair!