Soon after HART launched, co-founder Anna Rayner warned members that "cyber security will doubtless become an issue" (one of the few things she got right!), and to "make sure anything controversial, or even whiffing of conspiracy isn't posted here".
Of course, nobody listened...
The origin of HART's security problems was arguably before the group even launched when, worried that it "wasn't the right message", they took a donation button off their website, having apparently raised only £1,434.99.
They then seem to have struggled to raise any other funds.
Founder Narice Bernard initially covered HART's Slack Pro license out of his own pocket, but apparently members wouldn't pay £13 each a month to keep it.
Instead they opted to deploy a free Rocket Chat install on their own server. Which turned out to be a false economy...
Making the security breach even more of an own goal, HART IT guy / conspiracy theorist Paul Wood claimed they "jumped before we were pushed" from Slack, because of paranoia that they'd be censored.
Other members thought the real reason was just that they couldn't afford Slack.
Ironically, HART had been warning members about security for months. In particular they were worried about infiltration, initially asking everyone to use their full name and photo in their profiles, and saying that nobody should join their Slack chat without a personal invite.
But when someone stumbled across a page for the new Rocket chat install on HART's website, apparently they were able to sign up and join without anyone noticing! Thanks to this massive security oopsie, several months of HART's internal chatter leaked out into the public domain.
As HART member Gary Sidley put it, after making the switch from their old Slack service to the new, unsecured Rocket install, "if I can get in, anyone can".
They could, and they did.
So like Gary said, "well done Paul Wood for making it easy" for (literally) anyone to get in!
Thanks to HART's technical incompetence, we now have 8 months of their chat logs.
Tens of thousands of messages cataloguing their crankery, conspiracy theories and collusion with media and MPs.
Whatever HART members' next job is, we can be fairly confident it won't be in cyber.
More #hartleaks threads here:
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.