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.
Cryptome predated WikiLeaks and other anti-secrets sites by about a decade. Although Mr. Young was an early supporter of WikiLeaks and even co-registered its domain, he became a critic of its leader, Julian Assange, whom he said was too focused on his own celebrity and too willing to redact certain information.
Mr. Young, in contrast, was a purist: As long as a document wasn’t a scam, it went on Cryptome. He said that while Mr. Assange considered himself a journalist, he thought of himself as an archivist, maintaining a vast trove of information but not responsible for its contents.
A former 1960s left-wing radical, Mr. Young maintained a healthy — some might say excessive — wariness toward the government. He often told journalists that he thought they were spies and accused former friends of being double agents.
Armed with degrees in philosophy and architecture, he spent the 1970s leading a design nonprofit in New York, Urban Deadline, which built things like street-front “schools” in low-income neighborhoods.
In the 1980s, he specialized in making sure a building’s systems and structures were up to code — work that he later compared to Cryptome’s mission.
“We are required by state laws as architects to police issues of public health, safety and welfare,” he told the website Vice in 2014. “This is in the name of the public good. From Cryptome’s perspective, we are obliged as architects to police the police, if you will. We are obliged to dissent, as required for the public good.”
Mr. Young was an early adopter of computer-assisted design, which in turn sparked his interest in debates about digital privacy that began to swirl in the late 1980s, as developments in telecommunications raised questions about the government’s monopoly on cryptographic tools.
Mr. Young joined the mailing list of the Cypherpunks, a loose group of hackers and programmers intent on opening up the internet and checking government efforts to monitor online traffic.
At the time, most government documents were still in hard copy only. Mr. Young had a scanner, which he offered up free of charge to anyone who wanted to leak secret papers online — a service that he and Ms. Natsios eventually turned into Cryptome.
“Cryptome was a critical piece of showing what kind of transparency the internet could bring,” said Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties in the digital world.
Mr. Young was not without his critics; even his admirers said that his unwillingness to consider national-security interests when posting documents online could be unreasonable.
But he countered that if anything, he was helping the government.
“If you know a weakness, expose it, don’t hide it,” he told The Associated Press.
John Lee Young was born on Dec. 22, 1935, in Millersview, a small town in central Texas. His mother, Beatrice (Rhodes) Young, oversaw the home, and his father, Orby Young, was an itinerant construction worker. They divorced when John was young, and he spent his childhood living with different relatives around the state.
After leaving school at 14, he spent three years at various jobs — picking cotton, hawking religious icons, selling Fuller brushes door to door — before joining the U.S. Army in 1953.
He was assigned to the Corps of Engineers in Germany. He spent his free time traveling around Europe, taking in the continent’s vast architectural heritage.
In 1956, despite his lack of a high school degree, Mr. Young entered college at Texas Tech. He transferred to Rice University in Houston and graduated in 1963 with degrees in philosophy and architecture. He then worked on historic preservation projects around the city.
He arrived at Columbia University in 1967 to pursue a master’s degree in the architecture school’s new historic preservation program.
A year later, he joined dozens of students in the occupation of Avery Hall, the university’s main architecture building, during the campus protests against Columbia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and its plans for a new gymnasium in Harlem.
Despite becoming a leader of the protesters, he was not expelled, and graduated in 1969.
Mr. Young’s first wife, Martha (Calhoun) Young, died in 1968, leaving him to raise their four children. His second marriage, to Marjorie Hoog, ended in divorce. He met Ms. Natsios in 1990; they married in 1998.
Along with her, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Marcolm, Lilac 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 Ms. Natsios kept the website spare in part to save time and money; he insisted that it took them only a few hours of work a week, and about $2,000 a year, to maintain.
It was, he insisted, a public service, his way of giving back.
“The thing that made the internet and the ’90s and the early 2000s special were people like John Young,” Ms. Cohn said, “who just kind of showed up and started making things that were interesting and useful and important and were just stubborn enough to make them happen.”
