[spankalee]

The J6 insurrectionists committed real crimes, and it's very good that they were rounded up, but afaiu most of the evidence had to do with them provably assaulting officers, damaging property, and breaking into a government building. Not that they messaged other people when they were legally demonstrating before the Capital invasion.

The real protection for the legal protesters and observers in MN is numbers. They can't arrest and control and entire populace.

[missingcolours]

People were also charged for coordinating and supporting J6 without being there, e.g. Enrique Tarrio of the "Proud Boys" was charged with seditious conspiracy based on activity in messaging apps. If people in these Signal chats were aware that people were using force to inhibit federal law enforcement, which some of the leaked training materials suggest is most likely true and easy to prove, and there are messages showing their support or coordination of those actions, I assume they could face the same charges.

[spankalee]

They had a lot more than metadata on Enrique Tarrio.

[missingcolours]

Right, usually law enforcement gets chat logs from a participant (search warrant for a phone, informants, undercover FBI agents, etc) and uses the metadata to connect messages to a real person's identity.