Team Themis: a pitch to go after WikiLeaks

In February 2011 Anonymous broke into HBGary Federal and published its email. The emails showed a proposal, assembled by HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico through the law firm Hunton & Williams, to undermine WikiLeaks and its supporters, including the journalist Glenn Greenwald. Palantir said afterward that it had not approved the work and cut ties with the people involved. The proposal was a pitch from private contractors. It is not shown to have been carried out.

Barrett Brown, who mapped the contractors

Barrett Brown's crowd-sourced Project PM catalogued the intelligence contractors behind the HBGary material. The FBI raided his home in 2012. In January 2015 he was sentenced to 63 months on charges tied to a link to hacked Stratfor data, to obstruction of the search, and to threats against an agent. The conviction was not for his reporting as such, but his research was the reason the case drew attention.

Sabu, Hammond and the Stratfor emails

Hector Monsegur ("Sabu", LulzSec) was arrested in June 2011 and worked for the FBI afterward. That is public record. Jeremy Hammond, who hacked Stratfor in December 2011 and was sentenced to ten years in 2013, says Sabu supplied him with target lists, including foreign government sites, and hosted the stolen Stratfor email on a server the FBI controlled. That detail rests on Hammond's account and press reports of the case, so it stays Claimed. It is the best-known example in the file of an informant steering other people's hacking.

One lawyer, both sides of the table

Tor Ekeland defended Andrew "weev" Auernheimer and other hackers charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His firm also represented Clearview AI, the face-recognition company backed by Peter Thiel. Same lawyer, clients on both ends of this map. That is a fact about who hires whom, and nothing more.

Brennan built it, Watkins ran it, Q lived there

Fredrick Brennan founded 8chan in 2013 and handed control to Jim Watkins in 2015; he left entirely in 2018 and spent later years calling the site a mistake. After 4chan banned GamerGate threads in 2014, 8chan took that crowd. The Christchurch, Poway and El Paso attackers posted there, and the Q posts ("drops") moved to 8chan in late 2017. The site was dropped by its infrastructure providers in August 2019 and returned as 8kun.

Brennan's death. A QAA podcast episode and a birthday database give his death as January 10, 2026, at 31. This desk found no major outlet confirming it, so treat the date as Claimed.

Epstein met 4chan's founder the week /pol/ began

Emails in the Justice Department's January 2026 Epstein release show the venture capitalist Boris Nikolic sending Jeffrey Epstein the Wikipedia page of Christopher "moot" Poole around October 20, 2011, with a note that the potential for "manipulation is huge." Epstein met Poole once; Poole was 23, not 15 as the research file says. 4chan's /pol/ board launched in the same days. Poole told The Verge the lunch was a single meeting, that he regrets it, and that Epstein "had nothing to do" with /pol/, a decision made weeks earlier. Nothing published shows Epstein founded, funded or steered /pol/. The overlap in dates is the whole finding.

Thiel, weev and "return to tribalism"

The same release reportedly includes a 2014 email saying Thiel funded weev, and a June 2016 email from Epstein to Thiel after the Brexit vote: "Brexit, just the beginning... Return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances." This desk has read press accounts, not the original files, so both stay Claimed. They show what Epstein wrote. They do not show what Thiel did about it.

Separately and on the record: Jeff Giesea, a Thiel ally, wrote a paper for NATO's StratCom Centre of Excellence journal arguing for "memetic warfare," meaning psychological operations adapted to social media.

Thiel as an FBI informant

Business Insider reported in October 2023 that Peter Thiel was an FBI confidential human source from 2021, code-named "Philosopher," reporting to Los Angeles agent Johnathan Buma on foreign contacts and attempts to penetrate Silicon Valley. The main source is Charles Johnson, who says he introduced them and describes himself as an informant too; a second person Business Insider spoke to confirmed Thiel was on the roster. Thiel's reply was "no comment." No FBI document has been published. Johnson is a self-interested source who has fallen out with Thiel.

McGibney v. Rauhauser: a $1.3 million award that reversed

James McGibney sued Neal Rauhauser for defamation in 2014. When McGibney tried to drop the case, Rauhauser used Texas's anti-SLAPP law (TCPA) to keep it alive. The trial court awarded Rauhauser $1 million in sanctions plus $300,383 in fees. In 2018 the Court of Appeals found the sanctions punitive and excessive and sent it back; after remand the award netted out to roughly negative $2,800, per Randazza Legal Group's account. Rauhauser's other role in this file is in chapter 12. The research file lists criminal allegations against several people around him. They are unproven and are not reproduced here.

Hamilton 68 and Project Birmingham

Hamilton 68 was a dashboard from the Alliance for Securing Democracy that claimed to track Russian-linked accounts. The Twitter Files showed Twitter staff concluding internally that it was labelling ordinary accounts. Separately, the New York Times reported in December 2018 that New Knowledge, a firm, ran "Project Birmingham," an experiment that simulated Russian bot activity in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. Its CEO said it was a research exercise. These are the two cases where the counter-disinformation industry was caught overstating its own evidence.

DISARM: disinformation handled like malware

The DISARM Framework grew out of earlier models called AMITT and SP!CE and is now run by the DISARM Foundation, with Alliance4Europe (funded in part by the Alfred Landecker Foundation) as a partner. Its published code maps influence-campaign tactics to STIX 2, the format cybersecurity teams use to share threat data (DISARM-STIX2; arXiv 2502.20997). Pablo Breuer, a former Special Operations Command officer, chairs it. Whether this amounts to censorship is a dispute between its critics and its builders. This desk records what it is and who runs it, and takes no side.

The CIA and Ukraine, after 2014

The New York Times reported in February 2024 that after Yanukovych fled in 2014 the CIA built a long partnership with Ukrainian military intelligence: secret bases near the Russian border, communications gear, and training for a commando unit. That is the whole claim kept here. The research file goes on to tie it to the 2016 U.S. election; that step is not documented and is left out.