(continued)

EYEBALLING JFK Young published these shots of JFK's jet-fuel tanks hours after a terrorist plot to blow them up was unraveled. At right is a close-up shot of Air Force One's anti-missile countermeasures

John Young doesn't look his age. He 
is fit and spry, and, with his coat, tie, and 
close-cropped gray hair, the picture of upper-middle-class propriety. Though he lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side, he wouldn't for a moment look out of place standing on a train platform in a Connecticut suburb with a briefcase in one hand and a Wall Street Journal in the other. He is soft-spoken, polite, and capable of delivering vicious insults in a measured, calm voice with just the hint of a twinkle in his eye. He has a wicked sense of humor and an impish smile that he flashes like a switchblade. He likes to fuck with people. Young cheerfully agreed to meet me in the bar of New York's Princeton Club, where his wife is a member, last spring. It wasn't until halfway into our two-hour conversation, during which Young was cryptic and reluctant to divulge anything but the most basic personal details, that I realized that it wasn't an interview. It was an operation.

Young was born in 1935. His parents were "marginal people" and his father worked at "menial tasks," he says, refusing to elaborate. He grew up in West Texas. He didn't tell me where, exactly. "We were at the very bottom of the social scale," he says. "And authority was the enemy. That's the psychological background." He attended Rice University in Houston and did a stint in the Army Corps of Engineers before moving in 1967, at age 32, with a wife and four children in tow, to New York to pursue a graduate degree in architecture at Columbia University. He studied there under James Marston Fitch, considered the father of the historic preservation movement. "Jim Fitch said he was the best student he ever had," says Tyler Smith, a fellow student and friend of Young.

In 1968, Young participated in the week-long seizure of Avery Hall, which housed the architecture school, during Columbia's student strike. He wasn't particularly radical, and says he joined in the protest "mainly because it seemed much more interesting than going to school." But the strike, and the intellectual climate surrounding it, ignited something in him. "He came to Columbia as a very traditional thinker—a conservative," says Alan Feigenberg, another student involved in the Avery Hall takeover. "A lot of the stuff we were talking about was shocking to him. He went through a metamorphosis."

Young and his fellow Avery Hall activists founded Urban Deadline, an activist group-cum-architecture practice that sought, improbably, to change the world through design. Throughout the early 1970s, Urban Deadline donated services to the poor, built storefront schools for high school dropouts, and scraped by on whatever paid contracts it could land. Young, who was a few years older than his colleagues, reluctantly took on a leadership role despite the group's nominally egalitarian structure. Everyone wrote out their own paychecks at the end of each week. Young's first wife died of cancer either shortly before or shortly after his arrival at Columbia (memories of his former classmates differ, and Young wouldn't say), leaving him to raise their children on his own. But, according to his fellow Urban Deadliners, he was single-mindedly devoted to the group and its radical goals. He delighted in his own political obstinacy, and in poking his finger in the eye of whatever establishment figures were within reach. "The best term that could convey a sense of him is erratic," says Feigenberg. "And eccentric." When Columbia offered him a teaching position, he argued with the dean that he shouldn't receive any payment since he had no prior teaching experience. Young once took out a series of ads in the small type along the bottom of the front page of the New York Times attacking I.M. Pei: "I.M. Pei: Why so many bad buildings?" When he was invited to say a few words at an opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he told the audience of patrons, "I've just had a chance to look around briefly, but if you move that Rubens and the Rembrandt and store them down in the basement, we could put 32 units of housing in here. We're prepared to start right now."

"I have no idea how John figured out how to make a living," says Tony Schuman, another Urban Deadliner. "I remember times when the electricity was shut off in his apartment because he was so wrapped up in this stuff that he hadn't bothered to find paying work. We were eating rice and beans." Over the years, financial necessity caused Young's classmates to peel off and start their own practices, and Urban Deadline effectively dissolved in the late 1970s. "I felt like you couldn't make a life of it," says Feigenberg, today a professor of architecture at the City College of New York. "John felt differently. He felt that it was his life."

We said, "We'll put up anything that no one else wants to put up," Young says. Within months, the site started to see daily visits from NSA computers.

Cryptome started in 1994, when Young was a member of an e-mail Listserv called Cypherpunks, whose members included such online luminaries as John Gilmore, one of the earliest employees of Sun Microsystems, and Tim May, a former chief scientist with Intel. Young happened across the group when he first got online. The cypherpunks concerned themselves with the policy implications of encryption technology, which at the time was a hotly debated topic. For the first time in the history of the electronic age, private citizens had access to powerful encryption software that allowed them to communicate with one another without government agencies having the option of listening in. The NSA, which exists for no other purpose than to listen in, objected, and a series of protracted legal battles ensued between the federal government and privacy activists. Philip Zimmermann, a cypherpunk and the creator of the Pretty Good Privacy e-mail encryption software, was investigated by the federal government in 1993 for making his software available online, on the grounds that doing so constituted the criminal unlicensed export of a weapon (charges were never filed).

When cypherpunks, many of whom were engineers and mathematicians working as government contractors, needed a way to leak classified technical documents about encryption, Young volunteered as a conduit, first using the small hosting space that his ISP provided and later launching Cryptome as a stand-alone site. "My defense is, I don't know what these documents are," he says. "It was pretty arcane stuff. We said, 'We'll put up anything that no one else wants to put up.' That was our motto."

Within months, he started to see daily visits from NSA computers. He'd gotten their attention. The site quickly shed its focus on cryptography, becoming a catch basin for random bits of information—data—about national security and government secrecy. Young and his wife, Deborah Natsios, who helps him run Cryptome, assembled it all in one permanent archive, where readers can fall through the rabbit hole for hours, scanning presidential motorcade security procedures, reading declassified CIA case files, and viewing enhanced photos of that mysterious bulge in the back of President Bush's suit jacket caught on camera during the 2004 debates. Young has posted 41,000 files so far and averages roughly 50,000 visitors per day.

"There's a massive organization of hundreds of thousands of people around the world totally counting on secrecy," he says of the intelligence agencies he covers. "They are the most 
unreliable people in the world. And it's corrupted our culture. There's nothing that should be secret. Period."

"He's a Johnny Appleseed of information," says Michael Ravnitzky, a former investigative reporter who has made the results of his Freedom of Information Act requests available to Young for posting. "Every time you go there, you find things that alter your worldview and make you look at things in a new light."

"He's a hero in a lot of ways," says Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "He's done such an amazing thing in such a quiet, steadfast way."

Young reads the Federal Register every day, files FOIA requests, electronically clips news coverage of the intelligence world, and tracks down court documents. He once paid a court reporter $9,000 for the complete transcripts of the New York trial of Osama bin Laden 
and 21 others for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings. (He sells a DVD archive of everything on Cryptome for $25 apiece and sells ads on the site; aside from that, Young covers Cryptome's costs himself.) "Cryptome functions like a kind of scout in the field of national security," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "John Young sees many things that others do not see, and posts things others do not, or would not, post. What makes it most useful to me is not the wild stuff, but the day in and day out monitoring of the national security landscape."

The wild stuff: In July of 2000, a disgruntled former agent of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, Japan's version of the CIA, leaked Young a list of more than 400 PSIA operatives, which Young promptly published. The Japanese government complained about the list to the FBI, and two agents called Young at his home to ask him to take it down. "It was very descriptive, and that poses a safety risk," says an FBI spokesman. Young refused, and published the names of the agents who called him. Three years later, two agents with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force dropped in on Young unannounced. They asked him to stop posting detailed aerial and street-level photos of nuclear installations, and to pass along any information he received that might help them unravel terrorist plots. "The complaint was, 'Is there some way to persuade you not to do these things?'" Young says. "They were nice guys, always very polite. They were a little sheepish about it." Young refused to take down the offending images, and told the agents that if he came across any information about terrorist threats, they could read about it on the site. After they left, he published the names of his visitors on Cryptome.

EXPLODED VIEW On the eve of Bush's second inaugural, Young published a "survey of presidential protection," including this illustration of the presidential Cadillac swiped from popularmechanics.com

The British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, was too canny to approach him directly, but it did reportedly try to get him booted off his ISP, after he published, in 1999, a list of more than 100 MI6 agents that had been released originally by former agent Richard Tomlinson on sites based in the U.S. and Switzerland. Those sites removed the list at the request of the British government, but Young grabbed it before it went offline. Since then he's added two more batches of names. "We don't discuss personnel," says an SIS spokesperson. "But it's obviously unhelpful and dangerous when these names are published."

"I would regard the damage he's doing as considerable," says Peter Earnest, a 36-year veteran of the CIA who now serves as the executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Earnest is also the chairman of the board of directors of the Association for Intelligence Officers, a group of retired spies, military intelligence officers, and even some journalists who cover intelligence, whose membership list—complete with addresses—Young published in 2000. "I think it's serious. We just finished a trial over Valerie Plame, and that was just one person. I don't know what purpose it serves aside from aiding people who would do them harm."

Even Young's admirers admit he goes over the line. "I think it's irresponsible," says Aftergood. "Publishing the home address of the Director of National Intelligence is not something I'd fight for. If an individual whose cover was exposed on Cryptome comes to harm, or if a facility that's highlighted—I can't even say it."

To Young, complaints about agents' safety is pure tradecraft. You can't argue with spies, because everything they say is a lie. Former covert operatives have told him as much, he says. "They say, 'Don't believe that, it's just standard fare. It's a ploy.' If you believe any of this, you don't understand how spies operate. They lie so much and run so many false operations and plant so many false agents. They expose their own agents so much—there's nothing you can do that they haven't already done. In fact, they hope you will do it. To muddy the waters."