But there are a few things that bother me. One is the obvious problem that ONI had no idea boxing was illegal on John's homeworld and that the Insurrectionist capture never happened. ONI should know better than that.

The other has to do with the entire premise of the story. Think back to the book, the Fall of Reach. Dr. Halsey and ONI wanted the SPARTAN program to be shrouded in such secrecy that they replaced kidnapped children with CLONES. They wanted compete secrecy and untraceable results. It's a perfect cover up, no one goes missing and the evidence dies a few years later.

Fast forward a few decades and now ONI wants a cover story on Master Chief's childhood. No one outside of ONI knows any personal details about the Chief except his first name. So ONI feeds Ben some info on the Chief: birth date, home world, home city, school. So much for an ONI coverup, eh? What's the benefit of giving Ben all that classified info? If ONI didn't want Ben to find out the truth and went to all the trouble of setting up fake interviews, why feed Ben ANY real info on the Chief? Why not say he was from another glassed planet with a different birthdate, different parents, different school? Heck, ONI is probably so powerful they could invent an entire planet and with their dozens of smart AIs plant enough fake evidence and photoshopped pictures to convince everyone it used to exist before it got glassed. Then even if Ben gets suspicious of the fake interviews, he only has fake info to go on if he wants to actually hunt the truth. He would get nowhere if all the info was fake.

But ONI basically handed Ben all the details* necessary to find out what actually happened. They either want Ben to discover the truth in an "organic" way and spill the beans on the facts of the SPARTAN program, or the writers of HTT have made ONI into bumbling, inept, careless "intelligence" agency. I hope it's the former.

*I'll ignore the fact that without John's last name, it would still be difficult to figure out which "John" in Elysium City or school Ben actually is talking about, there are probably lots of Johns in that school and city. Add to that the complication of tracking down survivors and records of a glasses planet and it'd be very difficult to narrow down exactly which John people from Elysium knew. However, this is a minor detail that I can suspend my disbelief enough for that part, but not the rest.