In Memoriam: John L. Young, Cryptome Co-Founder
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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.
R.I.P. John L. Young
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's also a much smaller one labeled 2016: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6d80e6bbc579f156a0f64432b27ad4bcc33e1e6d
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.
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/
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.