through h4x0r3d's eyes

Cryptome.org was publishing classified and secret documents long before WikiLeaks made headlines. Cryptome co-founder John Young told RT such sites are allowed to stay online so that spy services might keep an eye on their visitors.

There is no secrecy on the Internet, John Young warned.

“In terms of their being able to see everything that we are doing, we know that we cannot keep any secrets about our site and we tell our readers, ‘You should not expect us to protect you, because we are being watched and every other site is being watched, just like WikiLeaks is being watched,’” he said. “There’s no secrecy on the Internet – that’s the lesson we’ve learned and we are now trying to spread that.”

“They [the security services] use our site to see what’s going on and that’s something that we’ve learned about sites like ours. They are left in place in order to watch who comes there and see what kind of information we’ve put up,” John Young added. “The reason we haven’t been shut down is that we are useful to them to see what kind of attention is paid to this material. We think they actually feed us material to put up as they are feeding information to WikiLeaks and many other sites that operate the same way.”

John Young said Cryptome grew out of his participation in the group called Cypherpunks – which was also the group in which Julian Assange learned his skills.

“This group was composed of very highly-educated engineers, scientists and technicians who were mostly working for corporations and government on the technology of communication security,” he said.

Cryptome’s co-founder said secrecy is a biggest enemy of democracy.