Hamilton 68 is, per John Kiriakou, a company staffed and founded by former CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence officials — including figures like Mike Hayden and a former NATO deputy secretary general — that rates news sites as reliable or unreliable.[1] It makes money primarily by contracting with the Pentagon: when government employees search for news online, Hamilton 68 places a green or red check mark next to a given URL, effectively certifying or flagging the source for anyone on a government computer.[2] Twitter itself declined to adopt Hamilton 68’s red-check rating system, but the rating still appears on the Hamilton 68 site and pops up whenever the flagged link is accessed from a government computer.[3]
The Consortium News red-check episode
Kiriakou, a board member of Consortium News, says Hamilton 68 sent the outlet a letter threatening to designate it with a red check mark as alleged “Kremlin apologists,” offering an appeal. He says the letter was signed not by a senior analyst but by a staffer in his 20s who had briefly worked for a now-defunct science newswire and had published only three articles before joining Hamilton 68.[4] After Hamilton 68 issued the red check mark, PayPal permanently suspended Consortium News’s account and confiscated the $9,500 it held, preventing the outlet from meeting payroll. Consortium News joined a federal class-action suit with other publications that had received the same treatment; PayPal eventually returned the funds but the outlet remains unable to use PayPal.[5]