He meant my Google Photos album. Titled "ALL EVIDENCE." Spanning December 2009 to January 6, 2021. Years of screenshots, network maps, and documentation I'd been compiling since I started asking questions about QAnon from inside the Cicada 3301 network in late 2017.
Stewartson knew the vault existed. He controlled who got access. He positioned himself as the gatekeeper between my evidence and the press.
Five weeks later, on October 17, 2020, that same vault appeared in a Signal conversation between Aubrey "Kirtaner" Cottle and a person operating under the handle "High Fidelity" (@jcefidel on Twitter, citizenj@[redacted] on Google). The link was shared. Someone asked: "Spread or hold?"
The answer: "spread."
They opened it. They browsed it. The screen recording — now published on Barrett Brown's YouTube channel — shows them scrolling through my evidence while signed into citizenj@[redacted]. The album title is visible. The date range is visible. The contents are visible.
Nobody asked me. Nobody credited me.
I know this because Barrett Brown published the video. It's a 19-minute screen recording of HiFi's phone scrolling through his Signal conversation with Kirtaner, from September 18 to November 19, 2020. Barrett titled it "Manufacturing Dissent: Leaked Preparation for Kirtaner's 2020 Launch as 'Founder of Anonymous.'"
What the video documents, frame by frame, is the construction of Kirtaner's public narrative — not as an organic emergence, but as a funded, professionally managed media campaign.
At 04:00, HiFi quotes a PR professional offering to book Kirtaner for media appearances: "If you're still interested at 10k, and you are the named client, and as long as they have evidence when they make these claims, I can book them in a whole lotta places. And probably get a big story somewhere like NBC."
The PR person had contacts at the Washington Post, NBC/Peacock, Rachel Maddow's show, Mehdi Hassan's show, the Philly Inquirer, and the Chicago Tribune. They needed evidence — specifically, they needed screenshots about Flynn for their pitch.
HiFi's response: "Can you get evidence from Jim if he doesn't wanna play?"
Jim. Stewartson. The same person who had been my broker to The Atlantic five weeks earlier. The same person who told me, "Don't give him your vault."
My evidence was the raw material. Stewartson brokered access to the press. The Kirtaner/HiFi network distributed it. A PR operation packaged Kirtaner as the protagonist. I got reduced to a name HiFi mentioned after provoking me: "Oh, and I pissed Jim off / and Arturo T."
Money was changing hands. On October 14, Kirtaner wrote: "Yo, let's figure this money transfer out." HiFi offered PayPal. On November 9, the PR person sent a detailed pitch plan. Banking information was being arranged.
On October 28, after a Discord screenshot showed someone telling Kirtaner "you went from no one believing you to literally having it say you're the leader of anonymous and you got tons of respect from some cool people," HiFi typed three words that define the entire operation:
"we throw a larp"
Not "we expose QAnon." Not "we do the work." We throw a larp.
The most structurally important section of the video comes on November 14.
Kirtaner instructs HiFi to perform a scripted exchange. He literally dictates HiFi's lines: "I need you to send me this message back at me after the following messages: 'Uh... shit, can you get any of the evidence? We've been working with her on basically everything.'"
Then Kirtaner sends the setup: "So apparently Libby/SBA is an infiltrator or up to some shit according to a contact. Says they have evidence, etc, bad news."
HiFi delivers the scripted response on cue: "Uh... shit. Can you get any of the evidence? We've been working with her on basically, like, everything."
This was a manufactured conversation — staged in advance to create the appearance of a spontaneous alarmed reaction.
But what makes it worse is what comes next.
Laura Dilley — an MSU professor who had been working on QAnon research and who later published a peer-reviewed paper that formally acknowledged me — had sent Kirtaner a long message warning him not to trust Libby Shaw, Neal Rauhauser, Jim Stewartson, HighFidelity421, or ATafoyovsky.
ATafoyovsky. That's me. Dilley was warning people not to trust me — in a message addressed to the person who was manufacturing the very intelligence she was acting on.
Kirtaner's response: "tl;dr this bitch is trying to psyop me." Then: "and they involved you. So, ty for the play-acting. These people are terrible at this."
He was mocking her. He had staged the "infiltrator" narrative about Libby Shaw, and when Dilley took it at face value and wrote to warn him, he dismissed her as "play-acting" and called her "this bitch" — while simultaneously accepting money transfers and media bookings coordinated with HiFi.
When Dilley asked who he'd been in contact with, he named "Highfidelity" and warned her: "He uh... he goes hard. Worry about that dude a little." Warning her about his own collaborator.
This was not a two-sided conflict. This was an engineered topology.
Neal Rauhauser sat at the top. He co-founded the Social Media Intelligence Unit with James Patrick. He sent Libby Shaw cash, hardware, and burner phones. Shaw infiltrated the Discord and ran OSINT operations. Rauhauser brought William Welna into Laura Dilley's orbit as a cutout to control the data pipeline feeding her academic paper — and when the paper collapsed into litigation, Welna's surgical public disavowal became the weapon Schoenberger used in court.
Jim Stewartson ran a 500-person unvetted Discord server. Nicole Chenelle (@nicole_chenelle) documented this independently from the inside in January 2022: "myself & other volunteers were subjugated to individuals such as Neal Rauhauser without our informed consent on his background." Aubrey Cottle was in the server during domestic disputes. Libby Shaw joined after dating Kirtaner. Louise Mensch inserted herself daily.
And Rauhauser, in his own DMs with Jimmy's Llama from June 2021, dropped a link to my Twitter with the comment: "As a crazy person who runs around getting into useless drama, you might find some good material in there."
Dismiss the person. Mine the work. That's the pattern.
I asked Neal directly, in a Signal group Thomas Schoenberger added me to, why he stayed silent when Stewartson stole my research and my story. His answer: "he could not control Jim."
He could not control Jim.
The man who ran the operational topology — who co-founded the SMIU, who funded Shaw, who brought Welna in as a cutout — could not control Jim Stewartson. The man who maintained Maltego network graphs, filed OIG complaints, and threatened FBI counter-intelligence referrals in the same DM thread where he called me a "crazy person" — could not control Jim.
The attribution theft wasn't by one actor. It was a pipeline.
I built the evidence vault. Stewartson brokered access to the press. The Kirtaner/HiFi network distributed it. A PR campaign packaged someone else as the protagonist. Daniel Morrison wrote five Medium articles between 2020 and 2025 that traveled an arc from naming me as "arguably the hero of our story" to zero body-text mentions. My Twitter DM archives with Morrison show a 222:31 link-sharing ratio — near-total one-directional research flow from me to him. Jack Bryan took my research for his American Psyop podcast. And Rocco Castoro — Barrett Brown's working partner, former VICE editor-in-chief — was independently identified by a source I'll call K as stealing my work alongside Stewartson: "Lestat is whose work has been stolen from him by Rocco and Jim."
K also warned me in July 2022: "You're now someone's op… they're pitting you and Barrett against each other."
Barrett Brown published the video that documents the theft of my evidence vault. I provided Barrett with the Telegram archives, Unity4J investigation, and Maltego graphs that contextualize it. I shared the vault link with him directly. He said, "Happened to me for the entirety of the last 15 years, only now finding out the extent."
We are natural allies. We have both been robbed by overlapping networks for over a decade. And Rocco sits between us.
As late as January 2026, Dilley was still tweeting at Stewartson, explaining why she excluded my account from her paper: "his account was so fckn googolplex RTd (as in 🇷🇺) that including it created a godawful signal-to-noise ratio to detect network patterns."
The signal-to-noise problem in her data wasn't an accident. It was the downstream product of Rauhauser's operations flowing through Welna's data pipeline into her research. The same operations that created a 500-person unvetted Discord, that manufactured narratives about infiltrators, that funded Shaw and launched Kirtaner — those operations contaminated the academic data, and the contamination became the reason to exclude the original researcher.
My evidence vault was the source material. My exclusion from the paper was the result. The pipeline worked exactly as designed.
Barrett's video description says Kirtaner "had played no role in the anti-authoritarian activist movement" and that he'd spent much of the relevant period overseeing image boards because he "had to run child porn honeypots for the feds, as he later put it."
Kirtaner's own words from the Signal chat, September 22, 2020: "All this qanon mess has demonstrated is that it's time, I need to be the custodian, otherwise this will keep repeating."
He needed to be the custodian. That was the justification. And HiFi's three words at 14:00 in the video — "we throw a larp" — tell you exactly how they built the custodian's throne.
My name is Arturo Tafoya Romo. I go by Lestat online. Handle: @Tafoyovsky (and currently @cheshire3301). I've been investigating this network since late 2017. I was formally acknowledged in a peer-reviewed paper (arXiv:2207.05118) by Laura, but then she disavowed me;
And on October 17, 2020, someone logged into citizenj@[redacted] Opened my evidence vault in a Signal conversation, asked "spread or hold?", got the answer "spread," and the credit went to everyone except the person who built it.
The vault they opened was mine.
Bonus: Analysis of my communications with Rocco Castoro
Rocco is warm, funny, genuinely good company — the karate talk, the music swaps, the "señor Castor" bits are real human connection. That's what makes him effective as a bridge node. But watch the pattern when substance arrives:
When I show him the Vercel report documenting how hard Schoenberger uses his name: "i didn't look" / "kind of focused on other stuff, certainly not myself" / "that shit don't bother me." He refuses to engage with evidence of how he's being deployed.
When I warn him, Thomas only talks about someone like that "if he has his hand waaaaaaaay up there": He deflects — "Where did I say that? If Thomas is a victim, I am unaware of it." He doesn't address the manipulation signature you're pointing at.
When I tell him you knew in advance about him and Barrett: "The point is that you don't know you are doing what someone else wants" — and he doesn't respond to that at all. That's the most important thing you said to him in the whole conversation, and it just floats.
When you share the Barrett Brown video analysis and the Zack article: "Sucks. My advice would be to forget the Twitter screenshots and follow the money." When you say you already followed the money, he gives you "i dunno? Whatever you see fit" and suggests writing a book.
The "dad" dynamic: He offers it ("I'm like the dad you never had") then retracts when it creates too much relational obligation ("You might want to talk to Welna about this 'dad' shit. Cuz I don't like that sorta talk"). He wants the authority of the mentor position without the accountability.
The contaminated data exchange (Aug 11): This is the most operationally significant section. He's clearly receiving documents from Thomas (the Brian Quinn forensic exam, the network connections PDF), probing you about how Thomas got your data, and pressing you to confirm or deny specific details on the record. "Please agree that I am correct in my understanding. It's important." — That's not casual conversation; that's getting a statement.
The overall pattern: warmth without commitment, intelligence absorption without action, counsel that sounds wise but channels you away from the public investigation and into a book that takes years. He absorbs from all sides — you, Thomas, Barrett — and never moves on your behalf. Your closing line nails it: "Your replies read like a self-fulfilling prophecy turning real, and I can't do anything about it, and I still care a little."
He may not be consciously running anything. He may genuinely like me. But structurally, he's doing exactly what Kaidinin described — sitting at the intersection, absorbing intelligence, providing the social warmth that keeps everyone talking to him, and never converting any of it into action that helps the person who built the vault. The advice to "write a book" is the friendliest possible way to shelve me.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsdn4zeF9oMEvidence vault (still public): https://photos.app.goo.gl/JZXBiSbb4nVVDQrE8