Using his experience as a computer-savvy architect, John L. Young helped build Cryptome, a vast library of sensitive documents that precedes WikiLeaks and outweighs it in a way with a silent approach to revealing government secrets. He was 89 years old.
His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was due to complications of large-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to his wife, Deborah Nazzios.
Cryptome, a daughter of CIA executives founded in 1996, provides a grab bag of leaked, obscure public domain documents, presented in reverse chronological order, in reverse order, with bare bone-set displays in reverse chronological order, as if written on a typewriter.
Over the years, the 70,000 documents on the site range from the seemingly harmless National Intelligence University course catalogues – to the obviously best secrets, Young has exposed the identities of hundreds of intelligence operatives in the US, UK and Japan.
“I am a fierce opponent of all kinds of government secrets,” he told The Associated Press in 2013.
He was frequently visited by the FBI and his internet service provider, but sometimes he cut off the website for fear of legal entanglement, but he was never charged with a crime and Cryptome always came back online.
Cryptome had WikiLeak and other secret sites before about 10 years ago. Young was an early supporter of WikiLeaks and even co-registered the territory, but he became a critic of his leader, Julian Assange.
In contrast, Young was a purist. As long as the document is not fraudulent, it has been encrypted. He said that Assange considers himself a journalist, but he considers himself an archivist and maintains a huge amount of information about it but is not responsible for it.
Young, a former leftist extremist in the 1960s, maintained his health towards the government. He often told journalists that he thought they were spies and accused his former friends of being double agents.
With a degree in philosophy and architecture, he spent the 1970s leading the deadline for the city, a design nonprofit in New York.
In the 1980s he specialised in ensuring that the systems and structures of buildings reached the code. Later it will be compared to Cryptome's mission.
“As a state law, we are required to be public health, safety and welfare issues as architects,” he told the website Vice in 2014.
Young was an early adopter of computer-aided design, sparking interest in the discussion of digital privacy that began to wobble in the late 1980s.
Young joined the mailing list for Cypherpunks, a loose group of hackers and programmers who open the internet and check the government's efforts to monitor online traffic.
At the time, most government documents were still in hard copy only. Young had a scanner, and he provided it for free to anyone who wanted to leak a secret paper online.
“We're a nonprofit organization protecting civil liberties in the digital world,” said Cindy Corn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an unfor-profit organization that protects civil liberties in the digital world.
Young was not without his critics. Even his admirers said they didn't want to consider the national security interests when posting documents online.
However, he retorted that if anything, he was helping the government.
“If you know your weaknesses, please expose them and don't hide them,” he told The Associated Press.
John Lee Young was born on December 22, 1935 in Millersview, a small town in central Texas. His mother, Beatrice (Rhodes) Young, oversees the house, and his father, Orby Young, was a patrol construction worker. They divorced when John was young, and he lived his childhood with different relatives around the state.
After graduating from school at the age of 14, he spent three years picking cotton, clutching religious icons and visiting fuller brushes door-to-doors before joining the US military in 1953.
He was assigned to the German Corps of Engineers. He traveled through Europe in his free time, incorporating the vast architectural heritage of the continent.
In 1956, despite a lack of high school degrees, Young enrolled in college at Texas Tech. He moved to Rice University in Houston and graduated in 1963 with a degree in philosophy and architecture. He then worked on a historic preservation project in the city.
He arrived at Columbia University in 1967 to earn his master's degree in the new Historical Preservation Program at the School of Architecture.
A year later, he joined dozens of students in the occupation of Avery Hall, the university's main architectural building, during a campus protest against Colombia's involvement in the Vietnam War and plans for a new gymnasium in Harlem.
Despite becoming a leader of protesters, he was not exiled and graduated in 1969.
Young's first wife, Martha (Calhoun) Young, passed away in 1968 and raised four children. His second marriage to Marjorie Hoogue ended with a divorce. He met Natuos in 1990. They got married in 1998.
With her, he was survived by his first marriage, three children and two grandchildren, Malcolm, Lilac and Anina Young. His daughter, Dara, passed away early from his first marriage. He lived in Manhattan.
Even after establishing Cryptome, Young never stopped practicing his architecture. He and Nazzios kept some of the website to save time and money. He claimed he only did a few hours a week to maintain, about $2,000 a year.
He argued that it was a public service, a way of giving back.
“It was people like John Young who made the internet and the special stuff in the '90s and early 2000s,” Cohn said.
