Dearly Departed of 2025

[robkelk]

RIP John Young, co-founder of Cryptome. He died at age 89 on March 28.

For folks who haven't heard of Cryptome, it's the sensitive-information archive site where Julian Assange learned how to set up a sensitive-information archive site.

Jon Callas, a co-founder of PGP Corporation, told The Register that Young was a complex character, and while the site did carry a lot of material about cryptography, its main purpose was to serve as a repository of all data that he thought citizens needed to know, regardless of what the government thought.

"I think he was absolutely a product of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, with cultural arguments over government secrets and what's really going on in the world, in social things like civil rights and other protests. He grew up in a world of MKUltra, the CIA, Watergate, and Vietnam," Callas told us.