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Unlikely thorn in government's side -- He posts public & Private information on a Website
Bergen Record ^ | 12.15.04

Posted on 12/16/2004 9:41:43 PM PST by Coleus

Unlikely thorn in government's side

Wednesday, December 15, 2004 

John Young certainly doesn't come off like an Internet renegade.

At 68, the native Texan is decades older than most hackers. He is a respectable architect, having done work for Columbia University, the Austrian Consulate and St. Cecilia's Roman Catholic Church, all in Manhattan. He resides in a stately apartment building on the Upper West Side, complete with doorman.

But John Young is all about making mischief - enough to irk more than one foreign government and to prompt a visit from the FBI.

On his Web site, www.cryptome.org  , Young posts secret documents - including the names of spies - along with revealing photos of potential terrorist targets: military installations, for example, or President Bush's Texas ranch or the innards of the George Washington Bridge.

"We'll put up anything that comes our way," he says. "We're completely irresponsible."

Driving Young's online hobby is a deep-rooted hostility toward official secrets and an equally deep skepticism about government security measures, from intelligence agencies to police barricades. The secrets and the security are not really about protecting the public, he asserts; they are about wielding power over people.

Consider those photos of the George Washington Bridge. He found them on a Web site of the Library of Congress, hidden in plain sight.

"We've got all this hoo-ha-ha about protecting bridges, and yet you go over to the Library of Congress, and there's all this information I've never seen before," Young says. "Part of security, as I've learned in this process, is just showboating. It's not real security. It's just talking like there is. They're strutting."

Most of the material on his cluttered site is, by his own admission, dull or arcane, such as proposed federal regulations and court documents about the government's use of technology, its efforts to keep many operations secret and its eavesdropping on private citizens. Some of the juiciest tidbits - for example, details about British undercover operations in Northern Ireland, provided by disgruntled former agents - are of limited interest to Americans.

But he has managed to annoy the British and Japanese governments by publishing the names of some of their active spies. Both countries, using the U.S. government as an intermediary, asked that the material be removed. Young refused. The British also asked the company that hosts Young's site to remove some material, to no avail.

The U.S. government has its own concerns about Cryptome. A year ago, a pair of FBI agents paid an unexpected visit to Young's apartment. According to Young, one of them told him that "a person had reported that his Web site could be used to harm the United States."

Although the agents politely assured him that nothing on his site was illegal, Young says, they also warned him that some of the information could be used for "harmful purposes" and could wind up "in the wrong hands."

When contacted by The Record, Special Agent James Margolin, a spokesman for the FBI's New York office, declined to discuss Cryptome in particular, but said such sites pose a dilemma.

"I think it's fair to say there is publicly available information which nevertheless might assist someone with bad intentions," Margolin said. "But the fact is, in an open society, that kind of thing may be unavoidable."

In 2000, Young posted a secret CIA briefing prepared for Japan, including a list of countries being targeted by the agency, tightly guarded budget and personnel figures, and the home number and satellite telephone number of the CIA official who prepared the memo. Japanese officials said the document was leaked by a former employee of their security agency.

Young has some limits. Although he says he will never remove anything from his site at government request, he will do so if presented with an order from a "U.S. court having jurisdiction."

So far, no such order has come his way, and the New York office of the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that a judge would order material removed from a Web site only if it put lives in imminent danger.

Young is also willing to remove material by personal request. In one rare instance, he removed the résumé of a man who once worked for an intelligence agency. He had posted it to a job site without realizing such information might reach broader circulation.

"He called and said he'd appreciate it if we took it down," Young recalls. "He was polite, so we took it down. By the way, if he's hostile, we never take it down."

Cryptome, which derives its name from Young's interest in cryptology, isn't the only Web site that publishes sensitive or classified information - the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org/main/home.jsp), the National Security Archive (http://www2.gwu|.edu/~nsarchiv ), The Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org), and the Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com) do the same, often through imaginative, dogged use of the Freedom of Information Act.

Young admires those sites and acknowledges that their content is often more interesting than his. But he tries to be more daring - he claims to be the only one willing to publish the names of intelligence agents. And he is admittedly more reckless.

"We'll publish anything," he says. "And we don't check it out. We don't try to verify it. We don't tell people, 'Believe this because we say it's OK.' We try not to give any authority to what we do. We just serve up the raw data."

Young hasn't been sued, although the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office last year ordered him to turn over visitor logs for a particular file on his site. Young told investigators he had no such data and never heard from them again, without ever learning why they wanted the information. The assistant attorney general who issued the subpoena declined to comment last week when contacted by The Record.

What's startling about the photos on his site, which he calls the "Eyeballing Series," is how easily Young found them. Many are satellite photos, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

The interior photos from the George Washington Bridge, taken from the Library of Congress's Web site, show areas that have never been accessible to the public. Since Sept. 11, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has prohibited anyone from photographing or videotaping while on the bridge.

Port Authority officials weren't aware of the photos' availability until The Record inquired, said spokeswoman Tiffany Townsend. She said the agency has no intention of doing anything about them because they are in the "public domain" and, despite the agency's restrictions, don't compromise the bridge's security.

Young dismisses the notion that posting such photos on his site aids terrorists.

Competent saboteurs, he says, wouldn't rely on the Web site of a 68-year-old architect.

"To the gullible, it seems like you're giving away the secrets," he says. "But in fact professionals don't rely upon this hand-delivered stuff."

Young traces his antipathy to government secrets back to his days studying architecture at Columbia. He got caught up in the 1968 student takeover - he calls it a "liberation" - of several university buildings to protest Columbia's expansion into the surrounding neighborhood.

Despite going on to design buildings for his alma mater, and marrying the daughter of one of the CIA's first spies, Young remained a radical - not the leftist variety, he says, but the civil libertarian type. Cryptome, he says, is his humble effort to set information free.

"We think America is made much stronger by this, and it's weakened by secrecy of all kinds," he says.



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Government; Japan; News/Current Events; Philosophy; US: New Jersey; US: New York
KEYWORDS: cia; fbi; foi; gwbridge; pa; portauthority

1 posted on 12/16/2004 9:41:44 PM PST by Coleus
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To: Calpernia


2 posted on 12/16/2004 9:41:56 PM PST by Coleus (Roe v. Wade and Endangered Species Act both passed in 1973, Murder Babies/save trees, birds, algae)
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To: Coleus
A) Whack this traitorous scum. Oops, we can't do that can we? We (fortunately) live under the Constitution and Rule of Law. Or can we? (see bold section below)

B) Ship him off to a country that doesn't have our soldiers protecting our freedom with their lives. Many places come to mind, but I can't think of the worst one. Any suggestions?

p.s.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

3 posted on 12/16/2004 10:05:56 PM PST by benjaminjjones
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To: Coleus; StillProud2BeFree; Velveeta; Revel

Ping


4 posted on 12/16/2004 10:07:59 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny (Today, please pray for God's miracle, we are not going to make it without him.)
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To: Coleus

This idiot better hope none of the intel agents he exposes decide to come after him.


5 posted on 12/16/2004 10:13:17 PM PST by Wolfhound777 (It's not our job to forgive them. Only God can do that. Our job is to arrange the meeting)
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To: Nailbiter

ping to self for later read


6 posted on 12/16/2004 10:56:21 PM PST by Nailbiter
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To: nw_arizona_granny

Interesting.


7 posted on 12/16/2004 11:04:33 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach (A Proud member of Free Republic ~~The New Face of the Fourth Estate since 1996.)
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To: Coleus

bttt


8 posted on 12/16/2004 11:08:44 PM PST by stainlessbanner
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To: Coleus
This seems to be pretty damn dangerous...I guess some people just don't give a damn if the enemy kills more innocent Americans.

IN FACT, some are helping them do it.

9 posted on 12/17/2004 2:31:20 AM PST by Recovering_Democrat (I'm so glad to no longer be associated with the Party of Dependence on Government!)
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To: Coleus

I don't think he should expose the names of active spies...


10 posted on 12/17/2004 3:10:50 AM PST by paudio (Four More Years..... Let's Use Them Wisely...)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

I would not have his photos of the White House on a site that I owned. (No, I don't have a website.)

It is almost as though he wants to make something happen.

The feds ask us to report anyone taking photos of bridges, buildings and other important landmarks.


11 posted on 12/17/2004 4:30:03 AM PST by nw_arizona_granny (Today, please pray for God's miracle, we are not going to make it without him.)
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To: Coleus

Maybe he can provide the following information for public benefit:

o John Kerry's missing military documents.

o Bill Clinton's sealed medical records.

o John Kerry's sealed medical records.

o All business and political transactions of George Soros.


12 posted on 12/17/2004 7:17:43 AM PST by sully777 (our descendants will be enslaved by political expediency and expenditure)
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To: benjaminjjones
You wrote:We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The FBI says:Although the agents politely assured him that nothing on his site was illegal, ...I guess Justice, a Perfect Union, and domestic Tranquility are in the eye of the beholder?

13 posted on 12/17/2004 7:41:21 AM PST by porte des morts
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To: Coleus

bookmark


14 posted on 12/17/2004 7:50:59 AM PST by diabolicNYC (Kill 'em all, let Allah sort 'em out)
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