John died March 28. I saw a note about it on cypherpunks, before
his death was made public, but might have missed follow-up postings:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/memoriam-john-l-young-cryptome-co-founder
John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the
first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place
where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t
want them to know. He made real the idea – revolutionary in its time – that the
internet could make more information available to more people than ever before.
John and architect Deborah Natsios, his wife, in 1996 founded Cryptome, an
online library which collects and publishes data about freedom of expression,
privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence,
and government secrecy. Its slogan: “The greatest threat to democracy is
official secrecy which favors a few over the many.” And its invitation: “We
welcome documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide.”
Cryptome soon became known for publishing an encyclopedic array of government,
court, and corporate documents. Cryptome assembled an indispensable, almost
daily chronicle of the ‘crypto wars’ of the 1990s – when the first generation
of internet lawyers and activists recognized the need to free up encryption
from government control and undertook litigation, public activism and
legislative steps to do so. Cryptome became required reading for anyone
looking for information about that early fight, as well as many others.
John and Cryptome were also among the early organizers and sponsors of
WikiLeaks, though like many others, he later broke with that organization over
what he saw as its monetization. Cryptome later published Wikileaks’ alleged
internal emails. Transparency was the core of everything John stood for.
John was a West Texan by birth and an architect by training and trade. Even
before he launched the website, his lifelong pursuit of not-for-profit,
public-good ideals led him to seek access to documents about shadowy public
development entities that seemed to ignore public safety, health, and welfare.
As the digital age dawned, this expertise in and passion for exposing secrets
evolved into Cryptome with John its chief information architect, designing and
building a real-time archive of seminal debates shaping cyberspace’s evolving
information infrastructures.
The FBI and Secret Service tried to chill his activities. Big Tech companies
like Microsoft tried to bully him into pulling documents off the internet. But
through it all, John remained a steadfast if iconoclastic librarian without
fear or favor.
John served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Germany (1953–1956)
and earned degrees in philosophy and architecture from Rice University
(1957–1963) and his graduate degree in architecture from Columbia University in
1969. A self-identified radical, he became an activist and helped create the
community service group Urban Deadline, where his fellow student-activists
initially suspected him of being a police spy. Urban Deadline went on to
receive citations from the Citizens Union of the City of New York and the New
York City Council.
John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not
only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to
information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years.
We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public’s right to know.
Other obits or mentions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999897
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptome
He spoke at HOPE a couple of times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnCGsIeCMHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8UtwVxHGF4
I did not find a NYTimes obituary for him.
~ Greg
