John L. Young, 89, dies; Pioneer with placing classified documents online

John L. Young, who used his experience as a computer-savvy architect to help build build CryptomeA huge library with sensitive documents that both preceded Wikileaks and in some respects surpassed in his no-star-baled approach to exposing government secrets, died in a rehabilitation facility in Manhattan on 28 March. He was 89.

His death, which was not reported on a large scale at the time, was of complications of the lymphoma of large cells non-Hodgkin, his wife said Deborah Natsios.

Cryptome, which Mr Young and Mrs. Natsios, the daughter of a CIA officer, founded in 1996, leaked a grab bag and offers obscure public domain documents, presented in inverted chronological order and in a bare, courier fight because they were written on a type writer.

The 70,000 documents on the site vary from the seemingly imperative – a course catalog of National Intelligence University – to clear top secret: Over the years, Mr Young has exposed the identity of hundreds of intelligence services in the United States, Great Britain and Japan.

“I am a fierce opponent of all types of government secrets,” He told The Associated Press in 2013. “The scale has so far been tipped in the other way that I am willing to stick my neck out and say that there should be none.”

Although he received frequent visits from the FBI and his internet providers occasionally demolished his website for fear of legal complications, he was never accused of a crime and cryptome was always quickly online again.

Cryptome prior to WikiLeaks and other anti-secets sites at about a decade. Although Mr. Young registered an early proponent of Wikileaks and even registered the domain of the domain, he became a critic of his leader, Julian Assange, of which he said he was too focused on his own celebrity and was too willing to edit certain information.

Mr Young, on the other hand, was a purist: as long as a document was not a scam, it went on Cryptome. He said that although Mr Assange considered himself a journalist, he considered himself an archivist and maintained a huge series of information but was not responsible for its content.

A former left-wing radical from the 60s, Mr. Young maintained a healthy-bonus saying perhaps excessive evidence against the government. He often told journalists that he thought they were spies and former friends accused double agents.

Armed with diplomas in philosophy and architecture, he spent the 1970s leading a design non-profit in New York, Urban Deadline, who built things such as street front “schools” in neighborhoods with a low income.

In the 1980s, he specialized in ensuring that the systems and structures of a building were in code – work that he later compared to the mission of Cryptome.

“We are obliged by the state laws as architects to do political issues of public health, safety and well -being,” He told the website vice in 2014. “This is in the name of the public interest. From the perspective of Cryptome we are obliged as architects to police, if you want. We are obliged to deviate, as required for the public interest.”

Mr. Young was an early adoptur of computer -supported design, which in turn aroused his interest in debates about digital privacy that began to swallow in the late 1980s, because developments in telecommunications raised questions about the monopoly of the government about cryptographic tools.

Mr. Young became a member of the mailing list of the CYPHERPARSA separate group of hackers and programmers who are planning to open the internet and to control the efforts of the government to check online traffic.

At the time, most government documents were still only in hard copy. Mr. Young had a scanner, which he offered for free to anyone who wanted to leak online secret papers – a service that he and Mrs. Natsios eventually became in Cryptome.

“Cryptome was a crucial piece of showing what kind of transparency the internet could bring,” said Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic border foundationA non -profit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world.

Mr. Young was not without his critics; Even his admirers said his unwillingness to consider national security interests when posting documents online can be unreasonable.

But he went against that he helped the government.

“If you know a weakness, it exposes it, don’t hide it,” 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, supervised the house, and his father, Orby Young, was a wandering construction worker. They divorced when John was young and he spent his childhood with different family members throughout the state.

After leaving the school at the age of 14, he spent three years on different jobs – choosing cotton, hawks of religious icons, selling fuller brushes from door to door – before he joined the US Army in 1953.

He was assigned to the Corps of Engineers in Germany. He spent his free time traveling through Europe and recorded the enormous architectural heritage of the continent.

In 1956 Mr Young went to the University of Texas Tech despite his lack of a high school diploma. He went to Rice University in Houston and graduated in 1963 with degrees in philosophy and architecture. He then worked on historical conservation projects in the city.

He arrived at Columbia University in 1967 to obtain a master’s degree in the new historical conservation program of the Architecture School.

A year later he joined dozens of students in the occupation of Avery Hall, the most important architectural building of the university, during the campus protests against the involvement of Columbia in the war in Vietnam and his Plans for a new gymnasium In Harlem.

Although he became a leader of the protesters, he was not deported and graduated in 1969.

Mr. Young’s first wife, Martha (Calhoun) Young, died in 1968 and left him to raise their four children. His second marriage, with Marjorie Hoog, ended in divorce. He met Mrs. Natsios in 1990; They married in 1998.

Together with her he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Marcolm, Lila and Anina Young, as well as two grandchildren. His daughter Dara, also from his first marriage, died earlier. He lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Young never stopped practicing architecture, even after he founded Cryptome. He and Mrs. Natsios held the website partly to save to save time and money; He insisted that it only cost them a few hours of work a week and around $ 2,000 a year to maintain.

It was, he, a public service, his way of giving back.

“The thing that the internet and the 90s and the special from the early 2000s made were people like John Young,” said Mrs. Cohn, “who just showed up and made things that were interesting and useful and important and just stubborn enough to make them happen.”