For those without knowledge of the history of hacktivism, Germany’s Chaos Computer Club (CCC) can sound like a worrying moniker. But the name was chosen for its shock value by co-founder Hewart Holland-Moritz (aka Wau Holland), in order to attract the wilder elements of the hacking world. He wanted to re-educate them and the general public about the benefits of cyber savvy individuals. It also related to Chaos Theory, which the CCC thought applied well to cyberspace. At the very dawn of the Internet Age, Wau Holland wished to make it a safer and better world.
The club's emergence, in the mid-1980s, sought to rescue the term 'hacker' from the doldrums of its bad press. A decade before a hacker had been someone pushing the boundaries of technology. By 1981, it had come to mean little more than cyber criminals intent upon break ins and theft. The CCC was formed to be the most spectacular consortium of hackers and to reintroduce the ethics, which had accompanied the birth of hacktivism.
Operation Bildschirmtext and the Rise of the Chaos Computer Club.
The CCC rose to prominence in 1985, when they challenged an assertion of security from a major Federal Republic government backed initiative. Bildschirmtext was a home terminal system used by thousands of Germans for everything from buying cinema tickets to booking train journeys. The owners, Deutsche Bundespost, claimed that it was foolproof and 100% secure. The CCC disagreed.
The collective exploited a flaw, which caused the Bildschirmtext system to deposit DM134,000 into the CCC’s Sparkasse bank account. The first that either Sparkasse or Bildschirmtext knew about it was when CCC called a press conference the next day to return the cash.
This was a massive eye-opener for the complacent banking corporations and the public alike. The former were forced to prioritise fixing the security of their systems. The latter weren't surprised by the break-in, as it was what they had come to expect from lawless hackers. But the return of the money won a lot of media approval. It set the credentials of the club, as the 'good guys', from the outset.
The Chaos Computer Club: Teaching Computer Science and Ethics to the Hacker Youth.
Before his death in 2001, Wau Holland ran a youth centre, teaching teenagers about the Hackers’ Ethic and computer science. His workshops grew out of a need to break the monopoly of Deutsche Bundespost over computer systems. All new modems, in Germany, required the approval of this corporation, who generally dismissed them in favour of their own. The Bundespost modems were extremely slow and expensive to buy. Wau Holland's workshops taught people how to construct their own hardware. The workshops were highly successful.
The workshops also allowed the CCC to demonstrate ethical hacking to their starry-eyed acolytes. These operations should only be done to publicly highlight security flaws, in order to create safer systems, when the patches were fixed. This notably occurred in 1996, when Microsoft's Active X was patched following a CCC demonstration of its insecurities.
Alternatively, these hacks could highlight a danger to the public in ill-conceived new technology. For example, in 2008, the collective obtained the fingerprint of Germany's Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, and used it to access areas requiring fingerprint identification. It was done to protest the use of biometric data in e-Passports.
Hackers with a Conscience: The Chaos Computer Club in 2011.
Over twenty-five years later, the CCC is still going strong. They have earned mainstream credibility and respect during that time, with governments and corporations enlisting their assistance in testing new systems.
Each year, the club hosts the largest hackers’ conference in the world and they do so with the full backing of the German establishment. The conference continues the work of Wau Holland's workshops, while also introducing new technology and hosting ethical debates on cyber issues. It was here, in 2008, where Julian Assange explained the work of WikiLeaks. It was here, in August 2011, that Daniel Domscheit-Berg tried to enlist the support of CCC for OpenLeaks. He was rejected, as the club questioned the morality of the information that he was giving them.
With early members now in their fifties and sixties, and a history of public awareness campaigns and social responsibility behind them, the CCC is commonly viewed as 'on our side'. As a result, many people perceiving Anonymous as youthful upstarts were reassured by unconfirmed rumours that the CCC were keeping an eye on them. Whatever the truth in both movements, it seems that the Chaos Computer Club have long since won the public relations war.
Sources:
- BBC News, Chaos Computer Club hackers 'have a conscience'. (February 11th, 2011.)
- Chaos Computer Club. (Site mostly in German, with some English language topics/articles.)
- K Hafner & J Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, p201-203. (Corgi, 1993.)
- The Guardian, Inside the Secret World of Hackers. (August 24th, 2011.) could could
Jo Harrington - Jo has a BA (Hons) in History and Philosophy and a MA in History. She has a book published on the history of Wicca.
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