But I don't know what's more interesting... 

The fact that this theory about autism exists or the creativity of the CIA?

It's in good hands now, I guess.


Interesting

{created=2026-06-12}

Imagine that it is 2011 and you are editing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Causes_of_autism/Archive_2#h-Neanderthal_Admixture_Hypothesis-2011-06-09T20:06:00.000Z[linked to it back in 2011 in a Talk of the "Causes of autism" Wikipedia page]. You are researching about the far fetched theory that it was Neanderthal mixture with earlier humans which led to the appearance of autism. You Google it up and list some links. One of them happens to be `autism-news.org`. https://web.archive.org/web/20110624175332/http://autism-news.org/[This is how it would have looked like at the time according to archive.org]. You mark it as "non-legitimate" and move on.

And imagine that, unknown to you however, <CIA 2010 covert communication websites>[this page was actually created by CIA employees as of of many to allow their agents to communicate information back to the CIA]! These pages would later be discovered by the target countries such as China and Iran, leading to the imprisonment and execution of many agents!

Well, this is exactly what happened to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Slartibartfastibast[Wikipedia user Slartibartfastibast]!

After the revelations of <CIA 2010 covert communication websites>, security researcher Ellie intentionally registered the domain https://autism-news.org[autism-news.org], and she found out that Wikipedia Slartibartfastibast had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Causes_of_autism/Archive_2#h-Neanderthal_Admixture_Hypothesis-2011-06-09T20:06:00.000Z[linked to it back in 2011 in a Talk of the "Causes of autism" page] discussing the legitimacy of the "Neanderthal Admixture Hypothesis".

Slartibartfastibast placed the website under a list:
> Non-legitimate source(s) that propose hominid admixture is behind autism
"Non-legitimate" it was!

Ellie created a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Slartibartfastibast#h-Accidentally_found_a_CIA_covert_communications_website_barnstar-20260113013600[Accidentally found a CIA covert communications website] badge for them which his exceedingly cute.

Attempts to reach Slartibartfastibast to ask how he found the website failed, https://x.com/Slartibartfas12[] is a possible account, and there is also a known similar <Gmail> address from a data leak which might match.

It is almost certain that they just happened to find the website while <Googling> for it, since we know that the websites were Googleable because it has been reported that the Iranians used <#Google dorking> to find some of them.<CIA 2010 covert communication websites/Timeline of public disclosures>{ref} This is presumably because Google had access to zone files, which are big dumps of registered domains that some registrars make available to some organizations.

<Ciro Santilli> subsequently searched for any more hits of the Websites on the <Wikipedia dumps> by grepping `enwiki-latest-externallinks.sql` which contains all live external links outgoing from Wikipedia. The only two hits were autism-news.org itself and inkfreenews.com which became a legitimate local news website for Northern Indiana as early as 2013. Inspection of:
``
grep -Po "inkfreenews.*?'.*?'.*?'" enwiki-latest-externallinks.sql
``
gives a few dozen hits, all legit. The next step would be to try and download full Wikipedia history for the period, but that would require more patience and would likely not yield anything of much interest either.

It is understandable why `autism-news.org` is would be one of the few websites most prone to being randomly Googled: unlike most websites which are quite generic news aggregator websites, this one contains a surprising amount of text. Much like the Star Wars website https://web.archive.org/web/20101230033220/http://starwarsweb.net/[starwarsweb.net], we would like to think that the contractor who made this one up actually put their hearts into it, and might have had a real personal interest in the matter. The quotes about Neanderthal Admixture Hypothesis are in the https://web.archive.org/web/20110703222306/http://autism-news.org/causes.htm[Causes subpage]:
> The Neanderthal Theory is that autism and other psychiatric conditions evolved from interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. This interbreeding is believed to have caused genetic material from the Neanderthals to enter the Homo Sapiens genome. Whether such interbreeding ever actually occurred is controversial, and this theory is extremely speculative.

The username "Slartibartfastibast" seems to be a variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slartibartfast[Slartibartfast], a character from <#The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> who according to <Gemini> is a:
> venerable "planetary designer" from the planet Magrathea, most famously known for his award-winning work designing coastlines and his deep, personal passion for creating fjords
So it's probably an autistic dude from the <UK>. Their Wiki homepage says simply however:
> I live in <NYC>.
and as of writing their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Slartibartfastibast[latest contribution was from 2014] and they are typical STEM nerd based on their edits.

\Image[https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/cia-2010-covert-communication-websites/screenshots/autism-news.org.jpg?raw=true]
{title=2011 <Wayback Machine> archive of https://web.archive.org/web/20110624175332/http://autism-news.org/[autism-news.org]}
{height=1122}
{source=https://web.archive.org/web/20110624175332/http://autism-news.org/}


 Discussion on "Link to CIA website autism-news.org found on Wikipedia from back in 2011" by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 40)