Image: Flickr/Ekvidi
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I phoned up Young and Natsios to ask how they felt the freedom of information movement has changed, for better or worse, over the past two decades.When Cryptome was launched as a bare-bones website and started to host an assortment of documents for anyone to sift through, there weren't many ways to get information out onto the internet. "We happened to have the technology to turn paper documents into a digital form," Young told me. "A lot of other people didn't yet have that technology: scanners, formatters."They offered this service to the cypherpunks list, an email chain linking some of the biggest movers and shakers in cryptography. Julian Assange was an avid reader, and years later the first vestiges of Bitcoin would be posted among its members.Young and Natsios are both licensed architects in New York. They said they thought it was ironic that Cryptome is considered an underground project, because "our work does increasingly take us to underground sites, in fact." These might be a subway system expansion, or vaults beneath sidewalks. Young and Natsios quite literally expose what is lying underneath the city.Request to Involved Citizens for Accounting and Release of Snowden Docs: http://t.co/gAFKhiupfc
— Cryptome (@Cryptomeorg) July 15, 2014
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Of course, a counter analogy could suggest that the whirring of pipes underneath the surface needs to be closed off to avoid being tampered with by those with a malicious intent, that having them publicly accessible could put the city in danger, just as having government secrets available on the internet could pose its own risks.Ten years after Cryptome first started, Wikileaks arrived. Wikileaks has been responsible for some of the most shattering disclosures in recent history, such as the Iraq war logs or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and although both outlets act in fairly similar ways, Wikileaks differed in one key aspect.We are required by state laws as architects to police issues of public health, safety and welfare.
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Snowden broke the iron-clad control of NSA documents. It is up to the citizenry what to do with them, not government-sponsored guardians.
— Cryptome (@Cryptomeorg) July 14, 2014
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