This is a must read. Radar Magazine has just posted an article profiling John Young, the founder of Cryptome ("Secrets and Lies: The man behind the world's most dangerous website." By John Cook). Young, a New York-based architect, is better known as one of the net's most ardent foes of government secrecy. Willian Arkin, washingtonpost.com columnist and NBC News military analyst, calls Cryptome, "the Google of national security." There are high-resolution satellite photos of President Bush's Crawford ranch, technical documents detailing how the National Security Agency spies on computer traffic, even the home addresses and telephone numbers of government officials, including former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. This is a truly amazing hodgepodge of information and fascinating background into a man who's single-minded focus is government secrecy.

Young is a mad scientist of secrecy, working with little more than monomaniacal focus and an Internet connection to turn the tables on the spooks and expose what he regards as a worldwide criminal network of intelligence operatives. And the spies don't like it.

If you haven't bought the Cryptome DVD data dump (and I know that most of you haven't!!), do so RIGHT NOW. For $25, you'll get a DVD of 11 years of Cryptome archives -- 41,000 files (4.4GB)  from June 1996 to June 2007 (scroll down the page on cryptome.org and you'll see the information on how to order). I don't know how you'll catalog it, but EVERY library in the country should have this DVD, if only for the complete transcripts of the New York trial of Osama bin Laden and 21 others for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings that are included in the collection. See more here of Cryptome's most controversial posts.

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Use of National Security Letters (199 pages, 36MB) U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General March 2007

Other copies: PDF at Washington Post, and a compressed version of only 12 meg at FAS; and an html version at cryptome

Is USGS Seamless website down?

The USGS Seamless website (Seamless Data Distribution System, Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS)), which has provided high-resolution satellite imagery of several dozen US cities without restriction and which has always been publicly accessible, now has a message on the homepage that says "The system is currently experiencing an interruption of service. All Seamless servers and services will be unavailable until further notice." Links are still active on the home page, though, and some still work and link to other servers. It is unclear what is online and what is not available.

Cryptome (29 April 2006) wonders if we are about to lose access...

Seamless began to go insane about a week ago, at times freezing, or delivering a variety of messages, and at one point requiring a password for access. Here's hoping Seamless has not been targeted for public closing by the secrecy-obsessed.

Cryptome, a website that collects material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- is making its entire archive from June, 1996 - November, 2005 available. They're selling their archive of 27,000+ files for $25/DVD, but will give the DVD for free to libraries and educational institutions. Simply send an email to John Young at jya [at] cryptome.net.