It's Rico Daley, I'm Adam Clark Estes.

A year ago today, thousands of rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, and now we're still trying

to follow all the digital breadcrowners they left behind.

This all played out online.

It was organized online.

There were hashtags for this stuff, you know, t-shirts are being sold, and then in the

insurrection itself, people were just like live streaming their crimes, posting selfies

of their crimes, like openly boasting about their crimes.

That's Rico D'Sera Morrison.

And over the past year, federal investigators have relied heavily on social media, and

while really records of everything people do online to find a rest and prosecute insurrection

people, you have thousands of people, and then I don't know something like millions of

social media posts that can be used as evidence against them.

People just documented everything they did.

But in what's become one of the largest investigations in American history, the FBI has

needed help to get a hold of the data about the January 6 suspects.

So naturally, it turned to tech companies.

If you're using your phone doing anything on the internet, anything online, using any of

these apps, it's not that hard for people to know what you were doing, and then the FBI

to sort of once they figure out who you were, build that case against you based on all

that stuff.

Well, the involvement of companies like Facebook and Google in the aftermath of the insurrection

...