John L. Young, 89, Dies; Pioneered Posting Classified Documents Online
John L. Young, who used his experience as a computer-savvy architect to help build Cryptome, a vast library of sensitive documents that both preceded WikiLeaks and in some ways outdid it in its no-holds-barred approach to exposing government secrets, died on March 28 at a rehabilitation facility in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was from complications of large-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his wife, Deborah Natsios, said.
Cryptome, which Mr. Young and Ms. Natsios, the daughter of a C.I.A. officer, founded in 1996, offers up a grab-bag of leaked and obscure public-domain documents, presented in reverse chronological order and in a bare-bones, courier-fonted display, as if they had been written on a typewriter.
The 70,000 documents on the site range from the seemingly innocuous — a course catalog from the National Intelligence University — to the clearly top secret: Over the years, Mr. Young exposed the identities of hundreds of intelligence operatives in the United States, Britain and Japan.
'I'm a fierce opponent of government secrets of all kinds,' he told The Associated Press in 2013. 'The scale is tipped so far the other way that I'm willing to stick my neck out and say there should be none.'
Though he received frequent visits from the F.B.I. and his internet service providers occasionally cut off his website for fear of legal entanglements, he was never charged with a crime, and Cryptome was always soon back online.
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