While many of the groups that took part in last year’s siege on the U.S. Capitol turned to Facebook and Telegram groups to plan their part in the attack, the Oath Keepers—a far-right org that’s best described as somewhere between a militia and a rag-tag group of wannabe vigilantes—are alleged to be bigger fans of the encrypted chat app Signal, instead.
In court filings that were made public this week following the arrest of 10 Oath Keeper members and the group’s leader Stewart Rhodes for their alleged role in the Capitol riots, authorities claim that they were able to access multiple invite-only chatrooms where group members coordinated their role in the riots. Authorities describe detailed meetings discussing everything from combat and firearms training to the uniforms Oath Keeper members were going to wear the day of. What’s less clear is how these encrypted chats were divulged in the first place.
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While it’s clear that these docs lay out some pretty horrific chats happening over Signal, it’s less clear how authorities were able to access these chats in the first place. Law enforcement has clashed with this particular app for years while trying to glean information on suspects that use it, and Signal often publicly brushed those attempts off.
In 2018, Signal’s developers told Australian authorities that it wouldn’t be able to comply with the country’s new Assistance and Access Law even if it wanted to because each message’s encrypted contents are protected by keys that were “entirely inaccessible” to the people running the app. More recently, authorities in California tried multiple times to get the company to budge on the issue and comply with the state’s subpoena requests, only to be met with the same responses each time.
“Just like last time, we couldn’t provide any of that,” Signal’s team wrote in a blog post at the time. “ It’s impossible to turn over data that we never had access to in the first place.” Heck, even recent FBI training docs that were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests reveal that the agency can’t access people’s chats on the app!
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It’s possible that one of the Oath Keeper members that was privy to these chatrooms cooperated with authorities and handed the details over.
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Another theory is that authorities gained access to these chats by gaining access to one of the defendants’ locked devices
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Source: DOJ Say Evidence Against Oath Keepers Came From Signal Chats
Or they infiltrated the group and were invited into the chatroom…
Robin Edgar
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