[HN Gopher] In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder
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In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 151 points
Date : 2025-05-15 22:16 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| baruchthescribe wrote:
| 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.
| os2warpman wrote:
| 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.
| DaftDank wrote:
| 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.
| spanktheuser wrote:
| I miss the sense of possibility, anarchy, and resistance of the
| early internet. RIP.
| beng-nl wrote:
| 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.
| schoen wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| John Young was every inch an example. He took time for anyone.
| Cryptome was the very best thing the internet could be.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| 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
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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!)
| ls612 wrote:
| 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.
| 47282847 wrote:
| Deserves a black bar!
| alienbirds wrote:
| agree
| romanhn wrote:
| 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.
| gjvc wrote:
| what's the best way at this point to get the Cryptome Archive?
| https://cryptome.org/cryptome-archive.htm
| immibis wrote:
| 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
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(page generated 2025-05-18 23:00 UTC)