4 ms·

In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder

271 points by coloneltcb 1y ago

baruchthescribe 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 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 1y ago
    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.
    - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
      Personally knowing people around Assange, I never got that impression about Julian either - until around the time it became personal between Hilary and him - you could then almost see the flip in real time and attacking the Democrats because a personal vendetta.
      - DrillShopper 1y ago
        I can understand wanting to live in a world after Hillary Clinton.
      - protocolture 1y ago
        The Biography I read on him from Daniel Domscheit-Berg seemed similar. The guy was always weird, but the crusade was him vs the governments of the world. He was proven right about a lot of the shit he was paranoid about. The revelation about the grand jury shut down a lot of lines of criticism.
  - rsingel 1y ago
    Yup, John saw that grift coming. I'm till wondering where the millions of dollars in crypto donated to WikiLeaks disappeared to. The last financial accounting from wikileaks was in something like 2011.
spanktheuser 1y ago
I miss the sense of possibility, anarchy, and resistance of the early internet. RIP.
aaron695 1y ago
Quite shocked. And sad it took this long to be talked about in memoriam. Cryptome was like an indie bookstore, around forever, eclectic and felt like a corner of the web you could go to get away from it all. A biography of their work - http://natsios-young.org/ http://natsios-young.org/ This day is missing from the 2004 Daily Show torrents - "Young, John. Feature, The Daily Show With John Stewart (16 August 2004)" It's a decaying web.
beng-nl 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
John Young was every inch an example. He took time for anyone. Cryptome was the very best thing the internet could be.
TheAmazingRace 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
unit149 1y ago
[dead]
47282847 1y ago
Deserves a black bar!
- alienbirds 1y ago
  agree
- AJ007 1y ago
  Wow, I had no idea he had died. This undersells what a critical influence he had in the direction the early internet took by setting a bar on what you could just post online (as an American.) Wikileaks got a lot of publicity, but Cryptome probably was much more important. If tech companies had more John Youngs and less sales people eager to sell censorship machines to dictators we would be living in an utterly different world today...
- neilv 1y ago
  I think the way to suggest a black band on HN is to email hn@ycombinator.com ASAP, with a link to the pertinent post.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
romanhn 1y ago
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 1y ago
what's the best way at this point to get the Cryptome Archive? https://cryptome.org/cryptome-archive.htm https://cryptome.org/cryptome-archive.htm
- immibis 1y ago
  Have you tried https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 ? There's also a much smaller one labeled 2016: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016 https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016
  - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
    I think there are people who are seeding the IPFS of the latest batch of releases, and I'm sure someone will host it somewhere soon.
  - EarlKing 1y ago
    Just a note that directly linked under that is a copy of the archive through 2024: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024
- electroglyph 1y ago
  i found this on btdig, supposedly 1 seeder: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6d80e6bbc579f156a0f64432b27ad4bcc33e1e6d
  - gjvc 1y ago
    thank you. zero seeders right now, though.
alfiedotwtf 1y ago
Oh shit! I went to cryptome just last week and was going to order an updated USB. The page says he was an early founder, but from memory John actually was the one to register and pay for wikileaks.org He was a really nice guy and was 100% about transparency, even when he made mistakes, he never covered it up like others would have. Genuine and always open to criticism.
0xDEADFED5 1y ago
oh wow, a true legend. RIP John.
throwaway81523 1y ago
RIP. I knew he had to have been pretty old. No idea if Cryptome has been active in recent years. I got their database dump on DVD back when it would still fit on one. No idea where it is now. He did good and he had guts of steel.
sherr 1y ago
I haven't visited the site in years but remember reading it every week back in the 90's, early 2000's. What I recall thinking was how it put th USA "freedoms" into sharp perspective compared to most of the rest of the world, including the UK (where I was). Some of the things he posted (the "eye-balling" secret sites, for instance) were things he'd be in jail for elsewhere. Or worse. Brave guy and it took some gumption.
- larodi 1y ago
  Indeed, I love opening it now and then and it is easy to see these people do work of monumental importance. Once gets the feeling of being on a website which actually matters, and has ever kept the spirit of 90s web activism.
eth0up 1y ago
You can see all the secrets clearly now, Mr Young, and work with certainty, in a place with walls made of truth and honor, where lies are distant dreams.
salawat 1y ago
Never met him, but the Gentle person's guide to forum spies on cryptome blew open my worldview in terms of expanding my awareness to include the fact that manipulating the apparent through technological means was an organizationally feasible means of manipulation. I've not been sure whether to hate having stumbled upon it, or be grateful. I'm probably not as healthy as I could be for having crossed paths with his post; I can't deny that lessons I took from that has served me well over the past decade, and allowed me to punch up for knowing what was going on. So requiescat in pace, J. Young. I'll do my damnedest to keep the signal alive.

271 points by coloneltcb 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 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 1y ago
  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.
  - alfiedotwtf 1y ago
    Personally knowing people around Assange, I never got that impression about Julian either - until around the time it became personal between Hilary and him - you could then almost see the flip in real time and attacking the Democrats because a personal vendetta.
    - DrillShopper 1y ago
      I can understand wanting to live in a world after Hillary Clinton.
    - protocolture 1y ago
      The Biography I read on him from Daniel Domscheit-Berg seemed similar. The guy was always weird, but the crusade was him vs the governments of the world. He was proven right about a lot of the shit he was paranoid about. The revelation about the grand jury shut down a lot of lines of criticism.
- rsingel 1y ago
  Yup, John saw that grift coming. I'm till wondering where the millions of dollars in crypto donated to WikiLeaks disappeared to. The last financial accounting from wikileaks was in something like 2011.

spanktheuser 1y ago

I miss the sense of possibility, anarchy, and resistance of the early internet. RIP.

aaron695 1y ago

Quite shocked. And sad it took this long to be talked about in memoriam. Cryptome was like an indie bookstore, around forever, eclectic and felt like a corner of the web you could go to get away from it all. A biography of their work - http://natsios-young.org/ http://natsios-young.org/ This day is missing from the 2004 Daily Show torrents - "Young, John. Feature, The Daily Show With John Stewart (16 August 2004)" It's a decaying web.

beng-nl 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

John Young was every inch an example. He took time for anyone. Cryptome was the very best thing the internet could be.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.

unit149 1y ago

[dead]

47282847 1y ago

Deserves a black bar!

alienbirds 1y ago
agree
AJ007 1y ago
Wow, I had no idea he had died. This undersells what a critical influence he had in the direction the early internet took by setting a bar on what you could just post online (as an American.) Wikileaks got a lot of publicity, but Cryptome probably was much more important. If tech companies had more John Youngs and less sales people eager to sell censorship machines to dictators we would be living in an utterly different world today...
neilv 1y ago
I think the way to suggest a black band on HN is to email hn@ycombinator.com ASAP, with a link to the pertinent post.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

romanhn 1y ago

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 1y ago

what's the best way at this point to get the Cryptome Archive? https://cryptome.org/cryptome-archive.htm https://cryptome.org/cryptome-archive.htm

immibis 1y ago
Have you tried https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 ? There's also a much smaller one labeled 2016: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016 https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  I think there are people who are seeding the IPFS of the latest batch of releases, and I'm sure someone will host it somewhere soon.
- EarlKing 1y ago
  Just a note that directly linked under that is a copy of the archive through 2024: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024
electroglyph 1y ago
i found this on btdig, supposedly 1 seeder: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6d80e6bbc579f156a0f64432b27ad4bcc33e1e6d
- gjvc 1y ago
  thank you. zero seeders right now, though.

alfiedotwtf 1y ago

Oh shit! I went to cryptome just last week and was going to order an updated USB. The page says he was an early founder, but from memory John actually was the one to register and pay for wikileaks.org He was a really nice guy and was 100% about transparency, even when he made mistakes, he never covered it up like others would have. Genuine and always open to criticism.

0xDEADFED5 1y ago

oh wow, a true legend. RIP John.

throwaway81523 1y ago

RIP. I knew he had to have been pretty old. No idea if Cryptome has been active in recent years. I got their database dump on DVD back when it would still fit on one. No idea where it is now. He did good and he had guts of steel.

sherr 1y ago

I haven't visited the site in years but remember reading it every week back in the 90's, early 2000's. What I recall thinking was how it put th USA "freedoms" into sharp perspective compared to most of the rest of the world, including the UK (where I was). Some of the things he posted (the "eye-balling" secret sites, for instance) were things he'd be in jail for elsewhere. Or worse. Brave guy and it took some gumption.

larodi 1y ago
Indeed, I love opening it now and then and it is easy to see these people do work of monumental importance. Once gets the feeling of being on a website which actually matters, and has ever kept the spirit of 90s web activism.

eth0up 1y ago

You can see all the secrets clearly now, Mr Young, and work with certainty, in a place with walls made of truth and honor, where lies are distant dreams.

salawat 1y ago

Never met him, but the Gentle person's guide to forum spies on cryptome blew open my worldview in terms of expanding my awareness to include the fact that manipulating the apparent through technological means was an organizationally feasible means of manipulation. I've not been sure whether to hate having stumbled upon it, or be grateful. I'm probably not as healthy as I could be for having crossed paths with his post; I can't deny that lessons I took from that has served me well over the past decade, and allowed me to punch up for knowing what was going on. So requiescat in pace, J. Young. I'll do my damnedest to keep the signal alive.