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At the end of September this year, a group of hackers announced that they had broken into the servers of the militant, anti-government organization known as Oath Keepers. After his break-in, the hackers kindly passed on the stacks of information they had acquired to a nonprofit journalism collective known as Distributed denial of secrets – which, in turn, made the roughly five gigabytes of emails, discussion logs, membership, donor and aspirant lists, and other related files available to everyone journalists who wanted them.
Since then, bits and pieces of information found hidden in the hack’s gigantic stacks of data have appeared in news reports as journalists continue to engage in the arduous task of analyzing the mounds of data relating to those associated with the distant. on the right, heavily armed, conspiracy group, (of which 18 members were indicted in a single federal indictment on counts including conspiracy and complicity in obstructing Congress, all of whom were to participate in the January 6 attack on the US capital- United).
As it turns out, the mine of pirated information includes a file that allegedly provides the names and personal information of nearly 40,000 Oath Keeper members.
When USA Today searched the list of 40,000 names, they found more than 200 people who identified themselves as active or retired law enforcement officers when they signed up. USA Today was also able to confirm that at least 21 of the 200 people still appear to serve in police departments across the country.
Meanwhile, in California, one of the first stories to be released regarding the information obtained through the hack was the news that in 2014, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had paid for a one-year membership in the Oath Keepers – which describes itself as a “non-partisan association of current and former military, police and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police lend themselves to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and national.”
Now NPR and WNYC / Gothamist have released a few their own excellent stories based on what reporters found when they compared the names on the group’s list of members to lists of law enforcement officers working in departments in the country’s three largest cities, namely the members of the Chicago Police Department, the New York Police Department, and “Los Angeles Area Departments”.
NPR and WNYC / Gothamist reporters learned that the Chicago PD had the most active officer names that appeared to match those on the leaked list, with 13 matches. The NYPD had two active members of the department whose names matched.
The LAPD had no correspondence.
As for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, however, NPR Journalists found at least three current employees whose information appeared to match the names on the Oath Keepers list.
When asked to comment on the new information, Los Angeles County Inspector General Max Huntsman NPR’s Tom Dreisbach told, that “the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has extremist organizations in its ranks.”
Dreisbach also contacted Priscilla Ocen, chair of the Los Angeles County Civilian Oversight Commission, who supported Huntsman’s finding.
“We have a problem with white supremacy in the LA County Sheriff’s Department,†Ocen said, adding the Los Angeles County Sheriff “looked the wayâ€.
So it appears. On a long list of problems.
More as we know.
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