On September 12, 2021 the CCC will be 40 years old old – a good occasion for a look into the eventful past of the “galactic Community of Living Beings for Freedom of Information and Technology Assessment “, as the club describes itself in its Twitter biography.
1. The beginnings of the Chaos Computer Club: Komputerfrieks, unite!
The word computer is still spelled with K in Germany when Herwart Holland-Moritz alias Wau Holland placed an advertisement in the taz on September 7, 1981 – and thus initiated the first meeting of the future CCC . As part of the Tuwat Congress in Berlin, a small gathering of interested parties will take place, “so that we as computer freaks no longer scurry around in front of us in an uncoordinated manner”, according to the text of the call. On September 12, 1981, the unofficial founding of the club took place in the Berlin premises of the taz, but after the opening meeting the geographical center of the movement was Hamburg. A few years later, in April 1986, it was officially registered as an association for better legal positioning. The aim of the association: The “promotion of freedom of information and a human right to at least worldwide unhindered communication”, so it says today on the official CCC website.
Even before the association is officially founded, the first magazine of the affiliated “Compumaniaks” appears: Im February 1984 edition number one of the data slingshot was printed. There should be no fixed publication rhythm, about “every 4 to 8 weeks” depending on the participation one wants to fill the four A4 pages, so the announcement in the first edition. Since October 2006, the club has made “all the data throwers we could get hold of in the PDF version” available for download.
Two somewhat thicker printed works also appear in 1985 and 1988: In the “Hacker Bibles” with the subtitles ” Cable salad is healthy ”and“ The New Testament ”are collected in addition to more detailed opinion articles, interviews and much more, as well as detailed instructions – for example those for the so-called“ data toilet ”in the first Bible. The illegal modem brand Eigenbau is a clear announcement against the telecommunications regiment of the Federal Post Office at the time, which only allows modems that have been tested and approved by them at high prices.
2. The Haspa coup: Friendly hacking in the screen text
In November 1984, Wau Holland and Steffen Wernéry took on the Post’s screen text system (BTX), which was launched in the previous year. According to their own statement, a program error caused them to get the BTX access data of the Hamburger Sparkasse. You create a chargeable CCC page and set up a program through which the Haspa account accesses the page every three seconds. Within one night, this results in damage of 135,000 D-Marks – which the two hackers ultimately do not claim, according to their convictions. The person responsible for Post, Erik Danke, remains convinced until the end that it was not a hack, but that the access data was spied – but the Post has to improve one way or the other, and the CCC is in the media echoed by the specifically conjured up known to the general public.
In the same year the first Chaos Communication Congress takes place as a central meeting.
3. Nasa hack and KGB hack: The crisis begins
In 1987 the CCC turned to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution after a group of hackers approached the club: They had access to NASA computers, the Esa and the Swiss CERN, but now feared the extent and consequences of their action. Under the wing of the CCC it should be mediated, a list of the affected sides goes to the CIA. However, Cern reports that there are numerous house searches, CCC press spokesman Wernéry is even arrested in Paris and is only released three months later.
In the so-called KGB hack, which partially overlaps with the NASA incidents, A group of hackers sells data from the West to the Russian KGB. The 23-year-old Karl Koch, who works under the pseudonym Hagbard Celine and founded the Hanoverian branch of the club, is also involved in this campaign. In March 1989 the responsible group was crushed by the police. Koch, who was addicted to drugs for many years and was under great psychological stress, was found cremated a little later, and finally suicide was officially established as the cause of death, but rumors of possible outside influences also emerged.
4. Nedap-Hack 2006: The CCC is asked for an expert opinion for the first time
In the years following these events, the club is decentralized. From 1990 East and West hackers networked, including a new branch in Berlin. In 1998 the so-called GSM hack succeeds in cloning telephone cards. The hacker Tron, who is found dead a little later, is also involved in this project. While the authorities also rate his death as a suicide, there are still doubts from his personal environment years later. In 2001, in the year of the 20th anniversary, the CCC founder Wau-Holland also dies at the age of 49 from the consequences of a stroke.
The CCC is adding further events to its repertoire and is increasingly positioning itself politically, for example through demonstrations. In 2004, CCC member Dirk Heringhaus revealed gaps in the Telekom security system in the data sling. “For a year now, the author has repeatedly informed Deutsche Telekom of the security gaps in confidence. Instead of eliminating the causes, only a few symptoms were combated, ”says the club’s press release, with which Telekom is publicly pressured – the leak, which is finally fixed, is not only private users, but also, for example affected by the BND.
In 2006, the CCC demonstrated together with a Dutch foundation how voting computers from the Nedap company can be manipulated – the devices were also used in the 2005 Bundestag election. As a result of the Nedap hack, the CCC is asked for an expert opinion by the authorities for the first time in its history, ultimately the use of the voting computers is classified as unconstitutional in retrospect.
5. The network continues to grow – and with it the topics of the CCC
A slightly different addition of the data spinner caused a stir in 2008: As a protest against the storage of fingerprints in e-passports, the CCC produced a fingerprint dummy made of thin film and included it in the booklet . According to the CCC, the imprint shown on it comes from none other than the Federal Minister of the Interior at the time, Wolfgang Schäuble – it was removed from a water glass at an event. Schäuble himself is not very impressed by this, but the campaign manages to provide the CCC with a media platform for its criticism.
In the following years, the club, from a few “bustling Frieks”, became an institution 8,000 members, critically grapples with various digital-political projects such as data retention, the state Trojan or contact data storage in the wake of the corona crisis. The last high-profile decision ng: In the future, the CDU will no longer be informed of any security gaps that have been discovered. The background was a criminal complaint by the party against IT security expert Lilith Wittmann, who had discovered a serious vulnerability in the software of the election campaign app CDU Connect.
The network that the computer freaks of 1981 entered is now hardly recognizable – and lobbying for their beliefs is unlikely to run out of CCC members in the next 40 years.
