Jan 28, 2009
Cryptome’s web master John Young interview in Radar
The closest Young comes to explaining to me why he created Cryptome is this: “I’m a pretty fucking angry guy.” He describes it as a public education project. But for every hard data point he offers, there’s the ever-present admonishment that secrecy corrupts everything. “We caution people, don’t believe anything we publish,” he says. “We’re totally untrustworthy. We may be a sting operation, we may be working for the Feds. If you trust us, you’re stupid.” It’s like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn’t want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.
(via My Heart’s in Accra)
Related posts (autogenerated):
- Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
- Casual sex not found to be psychologically dangerous for young people
- Guardian Launches Search Engine for Government Data from Around the World
- Youth who believe they will die young more likely to commit crimes
- The Failure of #amazonfail
“It’s like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn’t want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.
“Nihilist art project” really didn’t come to mind, actually. To me, that sounds more like 1) doing the right thing and 2) being honest with people.
[...] been hard to find someone else to publish the Abu Ghraib prison photos. Someone like Russ Kick or John Young would have published them, and blogs would have spread the story far and [...]