Miller has acknowledged using Signal — but says it’s mostly for sharing photos and discussing potential social media posts. But a former employee disputes that, saying the office used it for broader internal conversations.
Signal has settings that can lead to messages disappearing after a specific amount of time — which can be a problem when that runs into records that are subject to public records laws.
Richard Ruelas with the Arizona Republic has written about this. He joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Richard.
RICHARD RUELAS: Good morning.
MARK BRODIE: So, what exactly does County Attorney Miller say he's using Signal for? And we should point out that he has in the past said he doesn't use Signal.
RICHARD RUELAS: Correct. When I interviewed him in January, he had just told the New Times ... that he doesn't have the app on his phone. He told me in an interview that they do use it, and he said it was a fairly benign use. That, say, the example he used is: We're at the Sun City Republican Women's Club, we want to share a photo, the app that we're supposed to use through the county is clunky for sharing photos, so Teams seemed a better way to get the photo uploaded and just talk amongst staff, what are we going to post on Twitter about this?
MARK BRODIE: That turns out, though, at least according to a former employee who appears to be suing the — appears to be at some point in the future will sue the county, she says that's, that's not what they're using it for.
RICHARD RUELAS: Right. There was an employee who was let go. She says part of the reason she was let go was she raised concerns that she was told to use Signal and that she was told it was designed to skirt the open records law for the state of Arizona.
MARK BRODIE: ... Do you have examples or did she give you examples of the kinds of things they might be using it for that they shouldn't be?
RICHARD RUELAS: She did not speak to me. Her attorneys didn't speak to me. But she said in her notice of claim against the county that it was just generally recognized that our internal discussions in our office are going to be not subject to the state public records law. We want to keep them private.
MARK BRODIE: Did Miller dispute that?
RICHARD RUELAS: In our interview, he did dispute that. He said that if I filed a public records request, what I would see is what he said: the discussion of the photos, the discussion of what he called the headlines around the photos, and he said that he would provide those drafts for us if we asked.
MARK BRODIE: And of course, being a good reporter, you did ask, right? But that is not —
RICHARD RUELAS: [LAUGHS] Almost on the drive home I filed a public records request.
MARK BRODIE: [LAUGHS] In the lobby there, yeah. So, but like what he told you you would get is not what you got.
RICHARD RUELAS: I received in April a Signal message thread, a chain, that was not about photos or Sun City Republicans Club. It was a fairly detailed discussion about: What do we do if, say — just using as an example — Coolidge gets data from someone's cell phone and the Casa Grande Police Department wants it? Can we share that? And they were discussing an appellate court ruling about it.
That seems to be something that would be a work-related discussion that should be subject to the public records law. The thread was also topped, you could label a Signal chat with what you want to call it, and it was called like" "We're going to Nashville for a convention." So it was obviously also started because they were headed to some convention among county attorney's employees.
MARK BRODIE: So what did the County Attorney's Office say about what they sent you?
RICHARD RUELAS: They said two things: Only one employee used Signal within the office. Which is unusual because to, to post a message on a Signal chat, you need to be using Signal to do so. You can't just like phone one in.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, who else is that person communicating with on Signal if he's the only one on it?
RICHARD RUELAS: Right. The only way to get a message through Signal is through Signal. They also told me that, "Oops, that should not have been disclosed to me through the public records law" because it was what they called "attorney work product," which was not disclosable. So they said those two things: that I shouldn't have seen it at all and that there was only one employee who used Signal.
MARK BRODIE: Was there any comment about why there were no photos, social media post headline-type things that came your way?
RICHARD RUELAS: There was not. I asked for a follow-up interview with County Attorney Miller — and we waited a couple weeks before posting the story, and we never got a response. And then we asked — we were told to send some questions by email to be followed up on, and we've received no response to those.
MARK BRODIE: So we should point out, and you write this in your article, that in and of itself, Signal is not necessarily a problem for public officials to use. It's just some of the settings that come with Signal and some of what can happen to the messages that — that can be a problem. Is that right?
RICHARD RUELAS: Correct. I mean, the public records law says that if you're working for the state of Arizona, what you produce at work needs to be saved and archived for posterity, history and for the citizens to know what's going on, to be able to look at it. So you can use whatever you wish, you just need to be able to retain it.
So Signal has settings that, if you choose as a user, you can say "delete all the messages in this thread after a week." But there has to be a method, if they think it's preferred to do communications with, they need to be able to retain it under the law in a way that we as members of the press, members of the public, can see the operations of our government officials.
MARK BRODIE: And am I right that we don't know what kinds of settings the people who use Signal in this office had it on? Like, we have no idea if they had it set to delete after a certain amount of time or didn't have it set to delete at all.
RICHARD RUELAS: Correct. I think there's a lot of still mystery around this because, again, receiving only one employee's Signal messages was unusual given the fact that there were obviously other employees on the chain. And that they told me these are obviously employees talking with each other about legal stuff that you shouldn't have seen. I don't know what settings they had or why they didn't disclose more of it, or at least tell me why they couldn't disclose it, but say this is what we use Signal for.
MARK BRODIE: A lot of questions, and one of them is whether or not the state attorney general is looking into this because she was asked to.
RICHARD RUELAS: The County Board of Supervisors, which has a long, multi-faceted feud with the county attorney, has asked the Attorney General's Office to look at whether the office is violating the public records law. So that request has been sent. We don't know what the status of the investigation is because the AG's Office typically doesn't comment on that. But there is a lot of dispute between the County Board of Supervisors and its county attorney.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, sounds like a lot of questions, a lot of controversy there. All right, that is reporter Richard Ruelas with the Arizona Republic. Richard, thanks so much.
RICHARD RUELAS: Thank you.
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