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.

“Threats to democracy come from the secret keepers, and they need to be exposed. It has become a huge industry and it’s extremely expensive,” he said. “And you can’t criticize it, you can’t get access to it, because those who go inside that world are sworn to life-time secrecy about it and they can never talk about it.”

“This is a system which is anti-democratic and it’s a big business now. Thousands of firms have been drawn into it since 9/11, because it is very lucrative. We need to have less secrecy in Congress, less secrecy in the presidency, less secrecy in all forms of government,” he says.

John Young said governments leak more information for their own purposes than all the secret leaking websites put together.

“They [governments] run operations to leak secrets to test their own system,” he said. “There are schools to train people doing just that on the Internet. They teach their own people how to run these sting operations by leaking information to test their system. They are sometimes called A-teams and B-teams.”