Cryptome founder John Young profiled in Radar

Radar has just published an extensive profile feature on John Young, the New York-based architect who is better known as one of the net's most ardent foes of government secrecy:

Cryptome is, in the words of washingtonpost.com columnist and NBC News military analyst William Arkin, "the Google of national security." It is a meticulously maintained online compendium of information–some previously available to the public, some not–devoted to plumbing and exposing the secrets of the intelligence world. With a clean, crisp design, it presents, in no discernible order, simple red links to documents and text files against a white background. Much of the material Young collects is stultifyingly dull–"RFC Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code" will take the reader to an announcement in the Federal Register concerning a "mechanism for message authentication using cryptographic hash functions and shared secret keys" from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, for 
instance–but some of it is dangerous and even breathtaking.

During the past few years, Young has published detailed overhead satellite imagery of Site R, a military installation in Pennsylvania that he claims is Vice President Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. Hours after the FBI announced charges in June against four men for plotting to blow up jet-fuel tanks at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Cryptome ran photos of the airport tank farms, pointing out the exact route of a jet-fuel pipeline buried beneath nearby residential neighborhoods. He regularly publishes satellite photos of the homes of intelligence officials, including CIA Director Michael Hayden's Washington, D.C., residence. He has exposed the names of what he claims are 276 British agents covertly working for MI6, the names of 400 secret Japanese intelligence agents, and the names and home addresses of what he claims are 2,619 CIA sources.

(…) The closest Young comes to explaining to me why he created Cryptome is this: "I'm a pretty fucking angry guy."

Link to "Secrets and Lies," by John Cook. (Thanks, David Cho)

Previously on Boingboing:

  • Cryptome.org, repository of sensitive docs, gets shutdown notice
  • ABC News story on Cryptome.org