John Young
More info
- Occupation
- Architect
- Known for
- Cryptome (1996–)
- Co-founder
- Deborah Natsios
New York architect who in 1996 started Cryptome, an archive of documents governments would rather not see published.
Cryptome began as a mirror for crypto-policy material during the Crypto Wars and grew into one of the web's oldest leak archives: internal agency documents, lists of intelligence personnel, satellite images of sensitive sites. Young and Deborah Natsios published more or less everything that arrived, on the grounds that judging it was the reader's job.
Young was involved with WikiLeaks early on but broke away in 2007 and published the group's internal email, accusing it of caring more about money and attention than openness. That made him an unusual figure: inconvenient both to governments and to their loudest opponents. The site has looked essentially the same since the 1990s, which says something about priorities.