by Somewhere in the source code of a website the public was never meant to see, a secret society for the people who run the world kept a list of its members in plain text, sitting in the page where anyone who thought to look could read it. On the morning of Monday, June 15, somebody looked.[1] The group is called Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the investor Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, and for two decades it kept one promise to its members above all the others: that nothing said inside the room would ever be written down where the rest of us could find it.[1] That promise held until the society’s own code broke it.
The Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, who in 2023 exposed the United States government’s No-Fly List sitting unguarded on a misconfigured server, and who once breached the surveillance-camera company Verkada, found the directory after an anonymous tip and posted a list of 113 affiliates to the social platform Bluesky.[3][7] WIRED reported the breach on June 16 and said it had independently confirmed the contents.[1] Her own comment on the find was the most useful thing anyone has said about it. It astonished her, she wrote, that the people who run the world trust their own safety so completely they skip elementary security even for the off-record gatherings where they sit around deciding the collective future.[1]
What the code held
The 113-name directory came with a heavy qualification, one crimew flagged herself: the list does not record whether a given person is a member, a recurring attendee, or a one-time guest.[1] A second source handed WIRED something less ambiguous, the full registration for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, 222 people set to gather at a venue near Dublin from August 12 to 16, each tagged by status and type, including the categories active member and guest.[3] The exposed records ran well past a guest list. They held mobile numbers, birthdates, emergency contacts, and the political leanings attendees had declared.[1] They also held a romance feature. Dialog runs a matchmaking service at its own dating address, pitched as meaningful connections for exceptional people, that asks attendees whether they are looking for love and collected their political and relationship preferences under a guarantee of privacy the leak erased.[4]
The agenda is where the thing turns strange. The August sessions were advertised under titles like “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Battlefield Technologies,” “Build-a-Cult,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”, with a separate panel on surviving a third world war and the cult session moderated by the founder of a Christian networking site.[2][3] Those titles invite mockery, and the mockery is a trap. It frames Dialog as a curiosity, a billionaire’s costume party, when the real story is a question about who governs and whether they leave a trace.
The tell is the email address
The single most important line in the reporting is the dullest. None of the 222 people registered for Dublin signed up with a government email address. Every one of them used a personal or corporate account.[5] Read that against who they are. The roster includes the Secretary of the Treasury, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (an attendee since 2021), two sitting United States senators, a foreign ambassador to Washington, and six members of the PayPal Mafia that Thiel built.[3][5] By law, the working correspondence of those officials belongs to the public that pays them. The choice of a private inbox is a method, and the method places the candid exchange beyond the reach of public-records law, which means the agenda these officials help set gets set in a venue engineered to leave nothing a citizen could ever request.
Powerful people have always met. The corrosive part is the deliberate engineering of permanent deniability around officials who are supposed to be answerable to someone. Secrecy and unaccountability are separate offenses. A private citizen who keeps her guest list private has done nothing wrong. A cabinet secretary who conducts off-record business through a personal account has arranged for the people’s business to vanish, and arranged it on purpose.
Every age builds a clubhouse
The instinct is an old one. Bilderberg, the Bohemian Grove, the Mont Pelerin Society, the annual ski-and-policy festival at Davos: elites have always built rooms where they could talk without minutes. What separates Dialog from its ancestors is the merger of the clubhouse with the instruments of state power and war. Thiel’s Palantir builds the data-fusion systems embedded in United States and United Kingdom intelligence, software that merges public and private records to decide who gets targeted while operating outside public accountability.[6] His Founders Fund and the wider PayPal network seed the defense-technology firms now wiring themselves into the Pentagon. And Dialog itself has stopped wandering between resorts, buying land outside Washington to develop a permanent headquarters.[7] The retreat’s fixation on battlefield technology and the next war matches the businesses sitting in the room. The clubhouse used to sit beside power. This one is becoming the infrastructure of it.
The creed
To understand why a forum like Dialog should worry anyone who cares about self-government, read what its founder has published under his own name. In 2009, in an essay for the Cato Institute’s online journal, Thiel wrote a sentence he has never retracted: he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[8] He went on to describe the task ahead as an escape from politics rather than a victory inside it, and to name the obstacles to that escape, among them the growth of the welfare rolls and the extension of the vote to women, all of it steered by what he dismissed as an unthinking mass of ordinary voters.[9] Two years earlier, in a longer essay, he had painted liberal democracy as decadent and spent, and floated the old Straussian idea that a governing elite might need to maintain useful myths, noble lies, to keep the public in order.[6]
These were never the private musings of a powerless eccentric. Thiel turned the creed into a machine and the machine into a government. His most consequential protege is the Vice President of the United States, a man who has written that a talk Thiel once gave at Yale Law School was the most significant moment of his time there, and whom Thiel’s own biographer described as an extension of the billionaire’s thinking and his checkbook.[9] The man who declared in print that freedom and democracy could not coexist has spent the years since assembling the network that now helps staff and counsel the state. The phrase he chose in 2009 was an escape from politics. What the leak exposes is the shape of that escape: a way to hold power while answering to no electorate, no records request, no public at all.
A word about the senator from New Jersey
One name on crimew’s list will draw more heat in this state than any other on it. Senator Cory Booker, Stanford class of 1991, appears among the 113 affiliates.[7] Honesty requires holding two facts at once. The first is that the directory does not say what any listed person actually is, member or repeat guest or single visitor, and that ambiguity is real.[7] The second is that the roster is bipartisan by construction; the same list that names Booker names the liberal journalist Ezra Klein, the former treasury secretary Larry Summers, the former housing secretary Julian Castro, and Maryland’s Democratic governor Wes Moore on one flank, and Senator Ted Cruz and the former Republican governor Mitch Daniels on the other.[7] Presence in that room is not proof of agreement with Peter Thiel about the worth of democracy, and anyone selling you that inference is selling indignation, not analysis.
crimew supplied the other half of the truth in the same breath. She is no scholar of secret societies, she allowed, yet she doubts that showing up to one is much better than belonging to it.[7] That point lands hardest on a politician who has built a brand on resisting exactly this kind of concentrated, unaccountable money. In the spring of 2025, Booker held the Senate floor for more than twenty-five hours to dramatize democratic erosion, then converted the performance into a book. A quiet line into the premier off-record salon of the donor class makes the speech look like staging. I argued the case for the distance between the early Booker and the present one at length in a companion essay; this is one more point on the same curve, and it should be reported as what it is, a name in a leaked directory, until the senator accounts for it.
On the matter of how we know
There is a fair objection to all of this, and it deserves a straight answer. The information came from a leak, lifted from private records by a hacktivist, and some of the exposed are private citizens who hold no public trust: a television writer, an actor, a Nobel economist, founders whose only offense is ambition and a good address book. Their phone numbers and birthdates are nobody’s business, and the voyeur’s appetite for the dating service is beneath the subject.[4] The reason to write about Dialog is narrower and harder than curiosity. When sitting officials arrange to conduct candid business in a venue built to dodge the public record, the public’s claim to know what its servants are doing outranks the comfort of the room. The defensible reporting is about power and accountability, and it stops at the door of the genuinely private. That line is the one the indignant crowd online trampled within an hour of the names going up.
The photograph
Thiel told us his aim almost twenty years ago, in plain language, in a libertarian journal that printed him without alarm. He wanted an escape from politics, by which he meant an escape from the rest of us, from the vote, from the argument, from the obligation to explain himself to anyone he did not choose. Dialog is one of the rooms where that escape was practiced, off the record, no government addresses, no minutes kept. For a single week in June, through an accident of careless code, the people who had arranged to leave no record had a record taken of them. The reversal will not hold. The campus outside Washington will still rise, the retreat near Dublin will still convene in August, and the email addresses will stay personal. What the leak leaves behind is a clean photograph of power in the posture it prefers, talking freely among its own, convinced it owes the public nothing, and startled, for a moment, to be seen.
A companion piece, The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker, examines the New Jersey senator’s record at length and now carries a note on this leak.
End Notes
- Straight Arrow News, “Peter Thiel’s ‘Dialog’ network was super-secret. A data leak changed that,” on the discovery in the site code, WIRED’s verification, the 2006 founding with Auren Hoffman, the status ambiguity of the 113-name list, the categories of exposed personal data, and crimew’s remark on the group’s operational security. san.com/cc/peter-thiels-dialog-network-was-super-secret-a-data-leak-changed-that
- IBTimes UK, “Peter Thiel’s Secret ‘Dialog’ Society Leak Exposes Elon Musk, Ted Cruz and Cory Booker Among 113 Names,” on crimew’s record (the No-Fly List and Verkada), the Bluesky posting of the alleged-member roster, the cross-ideological spread of names, the cabinet and military figures named, and crimew’s point about attendance versus membership. ibtimes.co.uk/secretive-dialog-society-exposed-members-revealed-1803509
- Tom Midlane, Novara Media, “Peter Thiel’s Super-Secret Society Exposed Through Data Leak,” reporting WIRED’s findings on the 222-person 2026 registration, the August 12 to 16 retreat near Dublin, the session titles, the attendee roster including the NATO commander and PayPal Mafia members, and the matchmaking feature. novaramedia.com/2026/06/17/peter-thiels-super-secret-society-exposed-through-data-leak
- The Print, “What leaked records reveal about Peter Thiel’s secret society of elites,” on the dating service, the looking-for-love prompt, and the privacy guarantee voided by the leak. theprint.in/feature/peter-thiel-secret-society-of-elites-dialog/2962724
- The News International, “Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel’s secret society exposed in data leak,” on the registrants’ use of personal and corporate email accounts rather than government addresses. thenews.com.pk/latest/1406247-former-paypal-ceo-peter-thiels-secret-society-exposed-in-data-leak
- Christopher Marquis, “Peter Thiel, Would-Be Philosopher King, Takes on Democracy,” Jacobin, October 6, 2025, on Palantir’s role in United States and United Kingdom intelligence and on Thiel’s 2007 essay “The Straussian Moment” and its argument that elites should maintain noble lies. jacobin.com/2025/10/peter-thiel-would-be-philosopher-king-takes-on-democracy
- The Stanford Daily, “Levin, Stanford alumni appear on list of Peter Thiel ‘Dialog’ society affiliates,” June 16, 2026, on Senator Booker’s appearance on the 113-name list, his Stanford degree, WIRED’s verification, and the reporting that Dialog bought land outside Washington for a headquarters. stanforddaily.com/2026/06/16/levin-stanford-alumni-appear-on-list-of-peter-thiel-dialog-society-affiliates
- Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, the source of the line on freedom and democracy and of the argument for an escape from politics. cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian
- Jacob Silverman, “He Hates Democracy and Wants to Cheat Death,” Zeteo, August 8, 2024, on Thiel’s complaints about the welfare rolls and the women’s vote, on his characterization of ordinary voters, on Vance’s account of Thiel’s Yale Law School talk, and on Max Chafkin’s description, in his biography The Contrarian, of Vance as an extension of Thiel. zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligarch
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