-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/22045.html <A HREF="http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/22045.html">Political News from Wired News</A> ----- He Digs (Through) Gov't Muck by Declan McCullagh 12:30 p.m. 1.Oct.99.PDT Ask John Young what puts a grin on his face and he'll give you a ready response: Unearthing government documents, the more obscure the better. Over the last three years, Young has compiled what is probably the world's most extensive public collection of over 4,000 files about privacy and technology, often related to encryption and free speech, and always of interest to the thousands of visitors who frequent jya.com every day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Read more in Infostructure ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Young, an accomplished 63-year-old New York City architect who has taught at Columbia University, views his Web site both as a service to the Internet public and an experiment in information design and collection. When Young phones government agencies to ask them for electronic copies of documents for his collection, to submit freedom of information act requests, or to pore through the labyrinthine Federal Register each morning (on Tuesday he found the FCC's new wiretapping rules), he's acting just like a journalist. But he doesn't consider himself one. "My wife and I are both scholars -- we both teach. We like to put up original documents so people can make up their own minds. We see it as a librarian service," he says. A self-confessed 1960s radical -- at the 1968 Columbia University student strike, he met the students who would become his partners at the public-service Urban Deadline firm -- Young says he joined the cypherpunks mailing list in 1995 and soon became enraptured by the heated discussions of privacy, freedom, encryption, and the intrusive Clipper Chip. When a blue-panel federal commission the next year published an important but hardcopy-only "CRISIS report" that recommended reduced regulation of encryption products, Young decided the Internet community should be able to read it online. "We have a fair amount of equipment here including scanners since we use them for our graphic work.... I went down and got this CRISIS report and scanned it and put it up," he says. "That was the first thing we did and it got a nice response." It was also the beginning of what has become nearly a full-time job for Young, who offers his scanners as a community service. News organizations and public interest groups regularly send him volumes of hardcopy documents to be turned into text files and placed on his site. When the White House distributed intriguing details of new encryption regulations at a press conference on 16 September, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to make sure they'd be online. The group faxed them to Young that evening. Some of his readers are unusual. The US National Security Agency, the subject of a special section in Young's vast archive, appears to send a robot at 7 a.m. every weekday to download the latest files. "I still don't know if it's a bot or a person. But it comes every morning faithfully and takes whatever's new. It takes two copies. It sure acts like a bot," Young says. Whether person or program, visitors from spy agencies are a regular source of amusement for Young. His logs show that such first-time readers often browse other areas of jya.com, such as his architecture business. "Some of the new NSA folks usually come around and see who this John Young person is. Then they don't come to that area again and stick to the crypto stuff," he said. Not all visitors are as benign. Last week Young got a scare from what seemed to me a malicious bot run by the Korean government's Information Security Agency. In a 22 September post to the cypherpunks mailing list, Young said the agency had "set up [or allowed] a couple of robots to issue a sustained flood of requests for the same three files, one per second, which has nearly stopped access by others." But the so-called denial-of-service attack seemed to be an accident. "All of the administrators were off since it was a Korean holiday," Young said. A KISA system administrator explained in an email message: "In this case, this robot has a problem. It's process has gone to the loop-back mode. Let me try to fix it but it could need a few days because the manager of the TWISTer server is in absent. From today it started the holidays for 3 days in Korean(Oriental) Thanks Giving Days." So what transformed a student radical into a respected architect whose projects have included the Rockefeller Apartment, the Pierre Hotel, and Columbia University's Whittier Hall? The answer seems to be that he never changed. A 1989 New York Times article reports on what happened when the architect was interviewed on a local Channel 13 TV show. Young wore a welder's mask to protest the red tape involved in designing an alternative plan for the Penn Central railyards on the West Side. Now, however, Young is busy updating his Web site, usually with multiple items a day. Some he sorts into ongoing special reports on criminal prosecutions related to encryption, documents about British spy agency MI6, and international cryptography freedom. This wealth of painstakingly sorted information wouldn't be possible, Young says, without the Internet and the cypherpunks mailing list. "It's the greatest thing since love." Have a comment on this article? Send it. Send us feedback | Work at Wired Digital | Advertise with us About Wired Digital | Our Privacy Policy Copyright � 1994-99 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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