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2. Interview:
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5.         CRYPTOME.ORG: 1996/2016
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7. ◼ "Hoçâ Cové-Mbede of Tecno|Grafia[s] has been immensely generous proposing and hosting an in-depth dialogue to mark Cryptome's first two decades, 1996-2016. We welcome this unprecedented exchange for its forward momentum towards the future​."
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9. ▬ Deborah Natsios and John Young, Cryptome
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11. ▀TECNOLOGÍAS▂VIGILANCIA           ▂SERIES
12. ▀SURVEILLANCE▂TECHNOLOGIES
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14. ⇲ CRYPTOME INTERVIEW 1996/2016 | TEXT-ONLY VERSION
15. INTERVIEW | CRYPTOME: 1996/2016
16. 6/28/2016
17. "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here -- or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored. "
18. Picture
19. 〼 IN JUNE OF THIS YEAR CRYPTOME.ORG TURNS 20 YEARS OF RELEASING DOCUMENTS ONLINE. THE DEFINITIONS FOUND IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA DOESN'T NECESSARILY UNDERSTAND THE WIDE SCOPE THAT CRYPTOME HAS ESTABLISHED THROUGH THE YEARS.
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21. HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE THE FUNCTIONS OF THIS EXTENSIVE PLATFORM?
22. CRYPTOME: Cryptome's mission statement confirms we spend a lot of time poking holes in the exceptional privileges granted to the cult of security at the scale of the nation-state. Our tactics are as varied as can be expected when artists confront such a formidable juggernaut. Initiatives range from hosting and archiving an eponymous online library in the name of banned information, to engaging networked
23. debates, to practicing a critical cartography and a counter-market approach to licensed architecture. These shifting maneuvers are synergetic rather than reductive. Wry humor and irreverence sometimes help set the tone. We happen to hold political satire in high esteem.
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25. Embedded in Cryptome's synergism is the understanding that privileging security at the nationalist scale is usually achieved at the expense of policy commitments to security at the scale of the individual. Dual-use technologies with military and civilian applications offer a false rapprochement between two incommensurable scales. Security at the scale of the person is built upon the right to privacy that endows autonomous personhood in all those relational social dimensions David Lyon reminds us of. Privacy's relational dimensions are vital predicates for engagement in social space, and, not least for a robust democracy, the risky but crucial public space of protest and dissent. Self-knowledge and self-rule go hand in hand.
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27. It's been noted that at the same time as the State increasingly demands the individual be totally visible to it (through mass surveillance) the State increasingly demands that it be invisible to the individual (through secrecy). Cryptome's incremental daily practices of reverse-engineering these asymmetric visualizations are small-scale acts of public service in support of the information equality we believe undergirds self-rule. Cryptome Eyeball Series taps into open-source satellite imagery to flip the national security gaze back against itself.
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29. Each raw document offered by the Cryptome library is thought of as a public good invested at the scale of informed individual agency. This is meant to counter the anomic scales of Big Data algorithmics and analytics. Communities of engaged readers complete the collection's circadian feedback circuits 'from below' with ongoing contributions cycling via Twitter and other non-hierarchical platforms for exchange. Our generic A. signifies the contributor who requests anonymity. Some contributors have been forwarding material for twenty years. We think citizen declassification initiatives like those triggered by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are welcome exemplars of robust fair use and the reclamation of information on behalf of the public domain and an equitable information ecosystem.
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31. Cryptome's archive of around 101,000 files spanning 1996-2016 is currently backed up on a diminutive 64 gigabyte USB flash drive weighing around 4 grams, measuring 38.9mm X 12.3mm X 4.5mm. Authenticated drives are occasionally shipped by snail mail across the material time and space of global postal supply chains to supporters throughout the lived world. Recipients provide offshore backup and redundancy by mirroring the library through the lens of their active engagement with the information, no questions asked.
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33. As licensed architects based in New York City, John Young and I are mandated by code to give precedence to issues of public Health, public Safety and public Welfare (HSW). What does this public mandate really mean when deployed in the free-markets of the ascendant global city? HSW's infrastructure of public goods, embodied at the visceral scale of the individual, are devalued by some ranks of our profession because of the relative cultural invisibility of backgrounded infrastructure. We regret starchitecture's penchant of market-driven, scenographic branding. That glitzy approach perpetuates an inherently supply-side, trickle-down theory of consumption of public goods as a kind of non-renewable resource. The eye devours and exhausts the supply during repeated acts of false consciousness. Glossy brochures -- the industry standard for marketing architectural services -- are unintended chronicles of this unfortunate depletion. When asked for our brochure, we likely pay a heavy professional price by occasionally directing inquiries to Cryptome.org.
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35. We like to think of HSW infrastructures, like those constituted in the public library, as underground wedges for insurgent opportunity. This is especially the case in the context of the production of code-compliant places of assembly, which, like the library, should be fundamentally democratic sites. Issues of personal security and insecurity in the lived urban world, informed by HSW values invested in over 400 low-profile architectural interventions we've consulted on in the metropolitan NYC area (including some brick-and-mortar libraries) provide Cryptome's ethical point of reference against the inflation of national security power and privilege.
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38. ⧠ CRYPTOME.ORG, 1996/2016
39.  CRYPTOME: As an introductory gambit, we'd like to point out that the layered urban context that frames our perspectives on HSW security derives in many ways from uncertainties of our own unusually peripatetic upbringings. Mobility across shifting landscapes was for each of us the loom shuttle that threaded narrative at overlapping scales of being grounded in local and global childhood worlds. We track some of these swarming border-crossings in our cartographic works.
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41. As a youngster, John transited through 35 or more towns and rural locales of Central and West Texas while his father followed seasonal work as an itinerant laborer in cotton agriculture, rock quarrying and oil rig construction. They lived in the rough or in migrant worker sheds. They challenged foremen who tried to undercut wages by under- weighing 100-lb and 50-lb burlap sacks of cotton father and son dragged behind them while hand-picking along the rows. Rural elementary schools were accustomed to the episodic comings and goings of such transient child labor. John was taken out of school at 14 to help support the family full time, and by 17, like many young men from similar backgrounds, gained entry into the US Army. His construction skills placed him in the Army Corps of Engineers and he was abruptly transported 5000 miles away to the divided Germany of the Cold War era.
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43. My own childhood border-crossings intersected the Cold War in capital cities of Europe, Asia and South America with a parent who served as cold warrior during what is referred to, with irony in some cases, as the Pax Americana. We occupied the more clandestine enclaves of diplomatic corps extraterritoriality being negotiated by the era's East-West polarizations. Secrecy was the lingua franca of my childhood experiences of the putative Pax. At the same time, our Greek ancestry admitted us into displaced communities of the worldwide Greek Diaspora. This overlaying of covert and diasporic geographies camouflaged nomadic terrain that was continuously shifting.
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45. I keep a stained, typewritten leaflet as reminder of the tar bomb thrown at our house in Buenos Aires that reads in part: “Fuera politica del imperialismo YANQUI de intervencion en los paises de LATINOAMERICA.” Even after the rout of the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French colonial convent school in Saigon where I began my education continued to teach the pedagogy of French Empire. Nuns were stunned when one of their star Vietnamese schoolgirls abandoned her subject position in the imperial schema to join Ho Chi Minh's anti-French Viêt-minh liberation movement.
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47. The Cryptome library makes pretty clear John Young's and my youthful itinerancy did not end up producing a genre of leisure literature devoted to the consumption of world travel. Instead, Cryptome dedicates itself to bottom-up strategies for borderless information equality. We address issues of security and insecurity at the scales of larger worlds compressed into New York City's heterogeneous metropolitan milieux. We explore more insurgently democratic trajectories of information access than we ourselves experienced during somewhat furtive upbringings.
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49. In the information age, of course, all pathways to the information-rich lived world run through the gauntlet of the politics of information. That gauntlet is populated along either side by an alliance of aggressive corporate and government agents who stake interlinked claims on informational property. High value is given to national security information. As with running all gauntlets, Cryptome finds evasive mobility is key to emerging reasonably intact. Tecno|Grafía[s] is right to conclude that media efforts to pin down or define Cryptome miss the mark of what we hope is a moving target. Cryptome seldom cooperates with mediated attempts to fix our evasive travel itineraries along well-marked, more heavily surveilled routes of a branding economy that captures identity in order to fix valuations for media products within well-exploited markets.
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51. We recently produced an animated scroll of the full Cryptome index 1996-2016 for a talk on information policies and politics at Pratt Institute School of Information in NYC. With its 50-minute runtime, the scrolling index is a decidedly non-wayfinding map. Instead, it recapitulates the flowing time and space of two decades of Cryptome's information politics as a kind of borderless textual liquifaction that is hard to pin down.
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53. Cryptome continues weaving youthful narratives that became formally problematized during our respective undergraduate educations. We each ended up at graduate architecture schools, but before that, John completed an undergraduate philosophy degree with a thesis on existentialism that proposed an aesthetic theory grounded in Sartre's work. Sartre's notion of the authentic project is arguably present in the Cryptome library.
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55. And I, after becoming engrossed in the contrarian frameworks of non-Euclidean geometry, completed a mathematics major with research on transfinite numbers, an area of set theory that considers the meta-finite continuum. Negating Euclid's fifth parallel postulate and recognizing many infinities were very liberating logics.
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57. John and my problematiques somehow touched on ontological and epistemological aspects of childhood fugitivity that cast doubt on certainty, finiteness, fixity and a priori essentialist categories. These challenges to traditions of taxonomic diagnosis that fix nomenclature and classification continue to resonate in Cryptome's critiques of rigidly abusive classification regimes.