This is sad. I met him. Cryptome had an electric effect on me the first time I came across it - it was a leaked (?) gsm A3A8 authentication + session key generation algorithm document. I was fiercely interested in that at the time. I then started following cryptome near-religiously and one time, when I happened to be in NYC, arranged in in-person-meet with John Young so I could buy some copies of his cd archive, signed. I gave one or two away to friends. He joked that his hat was “hiding his lobotomy scars” (I think). Was short but special real life meeting.
I had a phone call with him in about 2000, because he was then publishing a lot of material about DRM (and attacks on DRM), and I was also into anti-DRM stuff and was thinking of going to an industry meeting related to it. I wanted to know if he would publish whatever documents I might obtain there.
I remember that he said I could make a business card (!) saying that I was a special representative or special agent or journalist or whatever I wanted for Cryptome.
I said something like "wait, really?" and he said something like "well, who I am to say who does or doesn't work for Cryptome?" or "why should anyone believe you when you say you do or don't work for Cryptome? people should never believe each other!" or something like that.
He also warned me to watch out for people messing with my laptop in the hotel.
I didn't end up making the business card (I thought it would make people more suspicious of me rather than less, which was probably right), but I think I did send him a couple of documents, in retrospect probably very boring ones.
I met him briefly in person once, ironically at the announcement lecture for Wikileaks at HOPE in New York. I remember being confused because I assumed he would get along well with the Wikileaks people, but he was already kind of skeptical or cynical somehow.
He was also famous for posting extremely cynical takes to mailing lists.
John seemingly felt that power had already corrupted everyone or was always on the verge of corrupting everyone, and that one should be extremely reluctant to believe in anyone's stated motives for anything. I don't know if he thought there was some way out of that scenario or that that was just human nature. He always reminded me of the epigraph of Illuminatus!, attributed to Ishmael Reed: "The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies."
I definitely admired his courage and independence.
This reminds me that you have to be a little crazy to resist some of the most powerful forces in our world. You basically have to say, I'm willing to sacrifice my life, be willing to be thrown in jail, be bankrupted, etc, just to keep people informed. There's no personal benefit here. And nobody's going to stop him on the street and thank him for keeping the powerful honest. In today's world, we definitely need more crazies for good. (And we need more organizations formed to help protect them!)
Before Assange it was pretty out there to expect to be arrested for publishing secret documents in the US (conditional on you not being the one to leak them in the first place). The Pentagon Papers and The Progressive cases appeared to provide clear precedent in favor of freedom of the press.
Fun side note: he accepted straight cash in the mail, but never accepted cryptocurrency as an option for donations. He was quite old school.
R.I.P. John L. Young
As a 90s teenager, cryptome.org was an incredible view into the hidden parts of the society. It's where I learned about Echelon surveillance years before its existance was admitted, numbers stations, crypto, spy networks, intermingled with all sorts of other "out there" conspiracy stuff (aliens, Area 51, JFK assassination). It was a pretty key part of the wild wild west of the early web for me. Amazing that the page layout still looks about the same as I remember. RIP.
I miss the sense of possibility, anarchy, and resistance of the early internet. RIP.
John Young was every inch an example. He took time for anyone. Cryptome was the very best thing the internet could be.
Classy obiturary by the EFF. Cryptome seems to have been around forever in internet terms - I just checked and indeed it's been almost 30 years. RIP John, your site was Wikileaks long before Wikileaks.
John was used by Wikileaks, registered the original Wikileaks domain, was blacklisted by Wikileaks insiders when he started questioning their financial (and "other") irregularities, and ended up cryptome'ing Wikileaks.
His site was not Wikileaks, he operated with morals and integrity. An example of this is how he had questions about how Wikileaks was publicized as a non-profit, when it was a project of The Sunshine Press-- a for-profit Icelandic corporation. Then the Wau Holland audit lies, selective releases, excessive and unaccounted-for spending, and obsession with money and publicity were all targets of his criticism.
John could smell the rot from a thousand miles away.
https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm
"Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." -John Young, on Wikileaks
John was a G. The O.G. His "Eyeball" series was the beginning of web-based OSINT.
I think the difference with John vs. Assange is that Assange seemed a lot more willing to take political sides/positions, whereas John was more neutral. I have visited Cryptome on/off for something like 25 years now. I have never once got the impression that he is the type of person who would selectively leak information out of political considerations.
what's the best way at this point to get the Cryptome Archive? https://cryptome.org/cryptome-archive.htm
Have you tried https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 ?
There's also a much smaller one labeled 2016: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016
Deserves a black bar!
agree