Remembering John Young, co-founder of web archive Cryptome

Obituary John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public’s right to know.

Before WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, BayFiles, or Transparency Toolkit, there was Cryptome – an open internet archive that inspired them all, helped ignite the first digital crypto war, and even gave Julian Assange his start before falling out with him on principle.

Cryptome was set up by Young and his partner Deborah Natsios, who were architects living in New York at the time. They had similar backgrounds – Young had grown up with a “nomadic, hardscrabble Texas childhood,” Natsios told The Register, while she spent her early life bouncing from country to country as her father, a CIA operative, rotated through assignments.

The 1968 student protests at Columbia University radicalized Young, she said. The protesters demonstrated most famously against the Vietnam War, but also against the university building a segregated gym on campus – the students called it “Gym Crow.” Young was one of the protesters who occupied Avery Hall before the police moved in, arresting 700 people and injuring 100.

“My family had spent four years in Saigon in the years leading up to the war, where my father was CIA Chief of Station,” Natsios recounted. “John and I both found our shared defiance of government secrecy had sprung from intensely lived experience.”

A quarter of a century later, the idea of Cryptome was born. Young was an early adopter of computer-aided design and was watching the birth of the internet firsthand in the early 1990s. Along the way, he became fascinated with cryptology.

At the time, the US government had classified strong cryptography as a munition unsuitable to export, since it could be used by an enemy to create encrypted messages that would be impossible to break. But in 1991, a chap called Phil Zimmermann developed a piece of software called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) that was considered too strong, and uploaded it to the internet.

The feds launched an investigation into Zimmermann and PGP under the Arms Export Control Act. That investigation was dropped and the source code was eventually published in print, but it inspired Young to launch Cryptome in 1996. His goal: publish documents about encryption and other matters that the government didn’t necessarily want people to know, so that people could make up their own minds.

Jon Callas, a co-founder of PGP Corporation, told The Register that Young was a complex character, and while the site did carry a lot of material about cryptography, its main purpose was to serve as a repository of all data that he thought citizens needed to know, regardless of what the government thought.

“I think he was absolutely a product of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, with cultural arguments over government secrets and what’s really going on in the world, in social things like civil rights and other protests. He grew up in a world of MKUltra, the CIA, Watergate, and Vietnam,” Callas told us.

The architect of information

If you visit Cryptome now, you’ll see a website that looks straight out of the 1990s.

There are no bells and whistles, and it’s slow to load, but the information is there in the form of over 70,000 documents, including details of government institutions, lists of known espionage agents working in the field, information on nuclear arsenals, as well as lighter material. Much of it is out of date, and some of it is inaccurate, but Young saw himself as an archivist of hidden source material, rather than a journalist who has to check facts before publishing them.

His background as an architect influenced the design of the site. “It took an architect to bring those skills to bear to create an information repository that was as organized and available and seamless to use as crypto was,” Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told The Register.

“It wasn’t pretty, but you could always find what you were looking for. You know, it just worked and I think that’s because John and Deborah were able to bring their offline skills to the online environment.”

The information stored on Cryptome earned him occasional visits from the FBI and law enforcement, but nothing ever came of it. Microsoft, on the other hand, actually managed to get the site taken down – briefly – after Young published Redmond’s Global Criminal Compliance Handbook, a 22-page dossier for law enforcement explaining how they could get data on Microsoft customers. Redmond convinced Cryptome’s ISP to pull the plug on the entire website. A mirror of the site soon popped up containing the offending material, and so, facing a losing battle and a barrage of negative press, Microsoft decided to drop the matter.

“Cryptome was a great resource for all sorts of materials. If it was controversial or under threat of censorship, Cryptome would keep a copy,” Matthew Green, an associate professor of computer science and a member of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, told The Register.

“They even kept a copy of one of my papers when someone threatened to sue us over it. They were an inspiration to a lot of things that came after them, and in many ways were better. I wish they still made people like John.”

Young and Natsios managed to keep the site up while juggling busy careers. He claimed in interviews that it only took a couple of hours of upkeep a day and cost less than $2,000 a year to host, but he believed that it was a public service and shouldn’t be turned into a money-making exercise.

Ethics and publishing

The money side of things was a big point of contention and was why Young shunned the site Cryptome is most often compared to – WikiLeaks.

When WikiLeaks started in 2006, Young was initially very supportive, and even co-signed its original domain registration. But within weeks he started to have serious doubts, in part because Assange seemed overly focused on money.

“Although John accepted to sign off on WikiLeaks’ original domain registration, he believed in an eleemosynary [charitable] idea of public service inimical to the ostentatious seven-figure fundraising plan that Wikileaks was soon vocally touting,” Natsios told us. “This was very problematic as far as John was concerned.”

Cryptome actually published the embarrassing US diplomatic cables that landed Assange in hot water the day before WikiLeaks, but never had any problems from the authorities. However, this was became a useful point for Assange’s defense lawyers in court, and Natsios recounted how he would taunt the authorities over this.

Young called Assange a “narcissistic individual” and accused the site of raising money to help military whistleblower Chelsea (born Bradley) Manning’s defense, while questioning whether those funds ever reached their intended target.

As for NSA secret-sharer Edward Snowden, Young was frustrated by the 2013 leak, and more so by how it was handled. Rather than releasing the cache publicly, Snowden handed the trove to a handful of journalists and news outlets. Some of them later destroyed physical copies of the files under pressure from the UK government, though backups remained elsewhere. While selected documents were published, the vast majority of the raw archive has never seen daylight.

“John was profoundly against any restrictions against disseminating the full scope of the Snowden material, and saw any decision to do so as philosophically untenable,” Natsios told us.

In terms of personality, Cohn described Young as a classic example of the quiet person who can do a lot without making a fuss about it.

“If you’d have told me that an architect from Texas, and his wife, with her history with the CIA, would be the architects for this kind of information archive I would never have believed you,” she said. “So I suspect, I suspect, that the next one to do this is going to come from someplace unexpected too.”

Young maintained the site well into his 80s, even when dealing with long-term health issues. He died at the age of 89 in New York, his home for decades, and is survived by his partner, and Natsios said he remained a fighter to the end.

“Optimism and pessimism are habits of mind the foot soldier in the trenches can ill afford,” she said. “John continued in the trenches, fiercely, day by day, until his last.” ®

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