 we can go. I am very excited to greet Julia here, Julia Erdogan. She wrote her doctor degree about my childhood and my youth, about the history of hacker culture in Germany, both East and West Germany. And I was somewhat active in the beginning times of the CCC and read the book with great pleasure. I didn't know all of the histories and was very excited. And after I read it, I thought that would be a great topic for Congress. And for one reason was surprised that Julia didn't hold this. And I was very excited to hear that she agreed to give this talk today here. So have fun with Julia and we are listening and waiting for your questions in the end. Hello. Yeah, thanks for asking me to do this. Yeah, it's a good question why I never did this. I always wanted to and now I have the opportunity. So thank you for the invitation and also the book review. I'm glad if it gets along well with the hackers. Yeah, I am a historian. And I was thinking about what I actually want to present today, which is a bit difficult, because I spent a lot of time with all of the matter and hadn't. And there's I can't tell everything. And but it's also a bit complicated and and to explain the conflicts within and and of course the history of the hackers and hacks is very relevant. And it had a lot of influence. And what I looked at was how did hackers influence the use of computers and how did this also influence into politics. So for the talk today, since this is also some sort of anniversary, which is always in five and 10 years, which is when we like to think about history again. And that's also when we historians get asked for our opinions. And so this is why the talk is called 40 Years of Tuvat. I will diverge a bit from what I originally wrote into the talk description and talk more about how the KS Computer Club got to bring itself into the context of history and what myths and stories it had to tell. And that's why I say myths. There are two myths of how the KS Computer Club got founded. One of them is the meeting in the Tuvat Congress and the other is the BTX hack, which is also one of the myths of how the CCC got founded. So the myth doesn't mean that it is completely freely invented and not true. It's more about what function does a myth fulfill and what is the creation point of this community. And now if we want to have a good myth, then we really need to look at all of the things that happened and choose only the the truth, all of the things that were relevant, which is not only historically relevant, but also ahistorically. So there are not only things that happened or didn't happen, but maybe also things that happened that aren't relevant. But in the end, there's always some truth in the core of the story. And it's also ahhistoric in some sense because it references a point in time, but it also has influence over more time, not just that point of where it originated. And myths and also legends and anecdotes, which can be grouped, there are lots of them in hacker culture. And so let me give an example here, which is a citation from Vau Holland, when he said hacker is somebody that can use a coffee machine to heat his sausage water. So the first person is going to say now, well, didn't he say that differently? And wasn't it the water for the potato puree? Or was it the heating plate to use toast? Well, maybe Vau Holland never said any of these words. Maybe he said all of them. Maybe he just warmed up some sausages somewhere sometime if it was in the club, if it was during some sort of Congress. And we don't really know, but we also don't really care. It's not that relevant. What's relevant is what he meant to say about hackers. And also what this citation says about Vau Holland himself. And once we get to know Vau Holland a bit, I never got to actually know him myself. But of course, by learning so much about him, I learned a lot as well about his personality. Yeah, it definitely checks out that he might have said this. And it doesn't really matter when exactly and how exactly he said it. So, okay, with this example, let's jump in to the myths and the history of the KS Computer Club. And that's also very interesting, because in the 80s, the history for the hackers was very much important. Very much especially for Vau Holland, who started building an archive of and which is still in the basement of the KS Computer Club, 120 folders, where Vau Holland collected a lot of material about the history of the club, about hacking, but also about communication history and lots of subversive use of technology. And while I was there for my research, all of this historical knowledge that was very heavy in the 80s has gotten lost a lot over the years. As an historian, I was of course asked what I'm doing there. And when I mentioned this archive, then somebody said, what that's in these folders, or maybe they didn't even know what folders I was asking about. So there is actually a massive treasure of history about the 80s and 90s history of the CCC. It unfortunately stops with them and it hasn't been completed further. And so all of this consciousness about history that was present in the 80s is not only expressing itself by building this archive and saving this history, but also going into the public. And they do this using the so-called hacker bible or rather hacker bibles, which is actually two. And one of them is from 85 and run from 88. So that means not even two years after the club got its name, or rather four years after this tour meeting, the case computer club, we said we need to think about the history of the club a bit more. And that doesn't even really fit a good anniversary. It's only four years. But for us historians, these collections of sources are really, really valuable. And then we can find a lot of things without having to look for a long time. But also in the 80s, all of these books really were also there to further the closeness of the community, to remind oneself where the history comes from. But it also, of course, is about a lot about how the hackers represent themselves to the outside and to the public. And in these years, there was starting to rise a bigger interest in this club. And within the 80s, the CCC is actually asked for a lot as experts that know this technology, but also that know the influence of technology on society. This is the time where home computers are rising. This is where online communication is gathering a lot of traction. And also, there is a lot of manipulation and misuse of technology. And where the hackers seen is diversifying massively with crackers and everything else. So we also want to explain who are actually the good guys and what are our intentions and where we're coming from. And that's why we tell that stories to to separate ourselves from that history. All right. So where is Chaos Computer Club coming from? It's supposed to be founded in 1981 after the Tageszeitung Taz, the paper Taz, was calling for a meeting in the Taz main building on 17 September 1981. That inner security can only be ensured using computers is believed by everyone in power today. That computers don't go on strike is slowly realized by medium sized companies too. That use of computers makes telephony even more beautiful. German post believes it has to prove now with the extreme text system and field test that the personal computer is now being imposed on video saturated BMW drivers becomes clear through the ad campaigns that are currently launched. And this is where it's now being received. So the hackers saying embedded computers can despite all that be used for useful applications that do not require large centralized organizations is what we believe in order for computer freaks to be no longer a story about uncoordinated. We do something and meet on and so on. So this is the relevant part. There's a call for action to be active. This is some sort of inception of community in the original in the source that I brought that you see here. There's also the information added. This is how it started. So this makes it easier for us historians how to use this source. And it is true that the computer club started. But it's not 100 percent true because obviously very important contacts were formed that influenced the later founding of the cost computer club. But those contacts were also formed through other means and some of the attendance also knew each other beforehand. And especially the founding fathers and mothers. This is especially true. And while Holland himself tried to found a club two years earlier. He requested if it was possible to found a computer club Europe which had to be denied because it sounded like a computer club that was already existing in Darmstadt is in historical sciences very unscientific to ask what's what if. But if the cost computer wasn't founded. We may not be in the House Communication Congress today. But on the European Communication Congress. I'm really happy to see that chaos prevailed. And I think that chaos is the better option. So there were earlier attempts to build a community. The contacts were already there. Not only from this meeting and additionally on this day the word cost computer club isn't being named. So it's just a loose network that exchange exchanges with each other. But the point is this meeting as a starting point for the cost computer club was very clever and also a great symbol because at that time it was chosen to fulfill two different needs. First of all it was supposed to talk to people who are interested in IT. And at the same time the International Funk Ausstellung a computer affair was taking place in Berlin. And the second point is the connection to the autonomous scene which tried to reactivate during these days. And a lot of these computer freaks were from this scene. And you can also tell by the language they use. The two words Congress was referring to tunics a meeting in 1978 which after the German Herbst the rise of the new German left which tried to oppose the new dogmatic and tried to try to oppose the retreat to the private sector. So it was supposed to create a new network and to make more of an impact on society. And this is what the hackers of the cost computer club to be prepared for. It didn't have a name yet. It was just a loose network. This group was meeting on the tish of the commune 1 in the touch main building which gives it even more symbolic meaning. Because this place and especially this especially this table already had a meaning of societal change. And in the preface for the first hacker Bible this is being a reference. This is what we are saying. We are inconvenient. And as the German post says we show atypical user behavior. We believe this is necessary as our environment becomes more step by it is required to endow it with life. It all began with the founding of the chaos computer club about four years ago. And as I said it wasn't founded four years ago. And we want to emphasize among all the the touch on whose premises the CCC was founded at the time. None of the editors understood it. But one of one women from the touch IT department is somehow involved since its inception. So this already shows both where it comes from and that it is required for hackers to do their part. The call to action again. And the connection to the political and for the call to action that is foundational for the cause computer club. Not only media who were asking the hackers questions and there's also a lot of letters in the archive. I've looked at a lot of letters but all of them obviously and a lot of them contact the cause computer club because of this political component. They are talking about resistance. They are talking about how to hack the federal police in Germany. How to change the world. How to actually contribute. And I've talked to a lot of hackers male and female and a lot of them told me that politics was a very important part of hacking. And the relevant thing that made the CCC different from from other computer clubs was the political component. And this is why it's especially important to emphasize this event. It's not the only inception with the other more unknown is the BTX hack. The hack of the BTX screen text system. And we see the two hackers who have done that. I'm not going to repeat what everyone already knows but the two these two hacked the BTX system and were able to take about 165,000 German mark from the hamburger spark. They sent a lot of data to the site and which caused it to crash and then return arbitrary data including the access data that they could use to log in using the spark account to log in to the BTX. And they wrote a program that called the page of the cost computer club which caused the hamburger spark to have sent about 130,000 mark to the hamburger cost computer club. There's also in the Bavarian hacker posts there's a different variant that says it was actually done differently. And it's not completely clear how the hack worked and it's not really relevant. We're talking about the function of this hack as a myth and because we are in the post factual time it actually doesn't matter that much. We can just pretend that it happened like that and we will find certainly some sort of source on the internet for it. And the important thing about this hack and this is also important that we don't know exactly what it happened is also how it was staged and what happened around it. It wasn't the first time that the CTC hackers were attacking the German federal post. They had earlier mentioned that BTX was very very insecure but that they weren't reacting the way that the hackers wanted them to. They were reacting like yeah it works more or less like we wanted to. So the hackers when they were returning from a privacy meter they wanted to bring it to the public and it was a very conscious decision. So they gave the German federal post the chance to react but they didn't. So they didn't only hack the system but also made it a public event and they were contacting the Heuter Journal a German TV news show. And that was very clever. That was not everything they did. They also were offered the opportunity to attack the political system of the federal Republic of Germany. They were asked by the Privacy Protection Officer of Hamburg how it worked and they that they chose to do it alone very consciously. They could have I mean they were thinking about using the immunity of a Bundestag delegate but then they realized that it would be a too long bureaucratic process and they would they would go away and therefore they wouldn't want to use these consequences. And so that's how they got this legitimacy that they didn't have to do the hack by themselves but they also had to execute the entire thing to express how incredibly insecure the system was. That's some sort of demonstrational activity. And it was also very clever to also use this opportunity to show that well actually politics is way too static and sticky and prevents that any fast action to respond to these things. And all of these hackers were much more inclined for the direct action rather than the slow moving government. And the very smart thing about this was that they were the only two that ever knew how the hack actually went and worked. And that was also something that the financial officer of the club said back at the time that there were plenty of hacks in the time but none of them was as well insinuated and presented as the one of the Sparkhasse especially because of how these two were the only ones that knew. And now so they created this image of the well-meaning hacker. They wrote a codex and they they created this reference point. And just also because this hack was so well executed and presented and something that could be discussed for a long time. And by many people that was another reason why the hackers just gained a lot of not necessarily popularity but allege in the public. And also a legitimacy for what they did and how they acted and the relevance of computers. And so in these happenings everything was in there that made the Kerch Computer Club. The connection to the autonomous groups, the big networks, the opposition to hierarchies and the opposition to centralization and the involvement of state actors and the post. And of course anonymity and of course this publicizing the direct action, the tuva that do something and engage yourself. And also a little bit the secret of not letting everyone to look into their cards. And that is essentially what makes the club itself. And the hacker Douglas Thomas says about hacker cultures in general. This is something I want to read to you real quick. Hacking is not and has never been about machines, tools, programs or computers, although all of those things may appear as tools of the trade. Hacking is about culture in two sense. First there are sets and codes, norms and values and attitudes that constitute a culture in which hackers feel at home. And second the target of hackers activity is not machines, people or resources, but the relationship among those things. In short, hacking culture is literally about hacking culture. Or to put it a bit shorter or differently with the words of our Harland, what is it to open up a computer and to open up a culture? And this is where I'm close to the end of the talk, but I do want to use this opportunity to mention a project that we are still looking for funds and members. And it is to make a new hacker Bible. There are these tools from the 80s, but they are from the 80s. And maybe there are a few more newer things to tell. And so my colleague Christian is in contact with Fenerchifa, who back then created the Bible and published it. And if all of you are thinking of something, of topics that should definitely be in there, and of course I also talked about how important it is to maintain the various opinions in history. And but also if you really don't want to write, but I do like to tell people how to write, then even then you can go to the email address on screen now to wat at redaktionminushab3.de. And I'm very excited for your questions and discussions. Thank you Julia very much. That was an amazing talk. Thank you very much. We will hopefully have many, many questions. And so I'll say again, if you have any questions or about the last years of hacker culture in Germany, go to the IRC channel. The IRC channel is below the video player in the stream, be another tap chat, or post to Twitter or master down with the hashtag RC3CSH for chaos studio Hamburg. And while the question pad will fill itself with questions, I would like to post one question from myself personally right now. How did you get to this topic? I know that in the beginning it was weird that I not me personally, but my youth is has gotten a matter of professional research, which I would have not expected. But how does one get to thinking hacker culture is the thing that I want to research and think about? It wasn't directly. I was concerned with privacy and information security. And then in Germanistic, and as a historian, I found out, wow, there's nothing there about hackers and the Chaos Computer Club. So the only ones who were writing about it were hackers themselves. So something has to be done. And it is a great topic for a dissertation. When you start reading these sources, it is very entertaining. So I decided I have to do this. It's interesting. It's very important. And I will be able to spend the next years with this topic. All right, great. Yeah, we're excited to learn and read even more about this. So maybe one more question from me before we go to the pad. One aspect that I really found very interesting because I didn't know a lot about it was on one side the comparison to East Germany and the culture there, but also the somewhat different role that the CCC had in Germany, as opposed to other European countries, and maybe even the US, where the hacker term is from and where it also definitely there is a big hacker culture, but maybe also a bit different. Yes, definitely. It's true that the Eastern part of Germany because there wasn't freedom of expression. It's very difficult. And the infrastructure doesn't really lend itself to online hacking. So there's a great difference, but there's also the hackers of the East were interested in computers. So they were trying to get modems illegally as well and go online. So there's also the possibility to express themselves and on the infrastructure level. And why the Chaos Computer Club is so different, why it is has such a special role is very hard to grasp because I'm trying in my book to look to France, which wasn't didn't didn't oppress freedom of expression. But the hacker history is completely different. It's completely hidden in completely different than in Germany. So it's really the people involved among them, while Holland, who were able to stage it in a very special way. And especially if you compare it to the United States, the thinking about monetizing your knowledge is probably not that but explicit. I'm not really sure what's there about the hackers in America. They realized how to make a lot of money with that. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs realized, oh, I can make a lot of money with that. And that doesn't work together that well with the sharing of knowledge and the sense of community. And so it's, for some reason, it doesn't start in Germany. Yeah, okay. So what question do I want to continue with? Maybe the question, why do you think that chaos is a better format than European computer club? And also, who really denied the European computer club its name? So the request was a computer club in in Darmstadt, which is called Computer Club Europe. So Computer Club Europa was very close as a name. It wasn't possible to put this into the legal documents. I prefer chaos because it has the Triple C Chaos Communication Club and Chaos Computer Congress. And Warholans once said, you need the chaos because you cannot oppose a society that is as ordered as itself. All right. So when exactly was the CCC EV, the legal entity founded? And what is the difference between the Chaos Computer Club and the Chaos Computer Club EV? The EV was founded in 86. So they are a registered society. They have some, they don't have pay as many taxes. So there's a financial gain. That's one point. And the other point is that the CCC EV is, for example, this Congress is the responsible as association, not a single person who would have to pay everything if someone trips over a cable. So there's a lot of reasons why you want that. And it's also a bit difficult because for a chaos community, it's a bit difficult because it comes with a lot of bureaucratic things like you need someone who does the finances and so on. All right. Now something very important. Can you please hold up your book? Somebody asked where one can buy your book? My book is called avant-garde of the computer usage, hacker culture of Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany and GDR. And I'm asking my great boyfriend to fetch it very quickly. It should be in the uppermost shelf. There it is. Great service. Thank you very much. So this is the book. Yeah, great. Thank you. All right. So there's another question. Is this archive from Vau? Is that somehow publicly available? There's two archives. I have to mention that. There's the Vau Holland archive that he created himself in the basement of the Chaos Computer Club Berlin. So I just wrote them a letter and Starbucks replied and said, oh, sure, just come and look at it. There's also the Vau Holland Foundation who has a different archive collecting CCC history, but more especially Vau Holland specifics things up to 2001. You have to contact the Vau Holland Foundation. It is public, but you have to be supervised. All right. Okay, now for a really technical question. Is Tuva.txt, does it exist as a file? I think we all know the scan from the printed charts except, but does the file exist? Oh, that's a very good question. Maybe the Vau Holland Foundation, you could ask, I haven't seen it personally, but they have thousands of floppy disks, boxes of floppy disks where they are stacked behind each other. Maybe you know how this looked. Maybe it's among those I can't remember. I thought somebody would want to correct the comma, which should be a dot. Yeah, good. So a bit more about the culture. So does the community have to become smaller and more local again, especially when one thinks about the sheer size that the Congress has become? Okay. Very difficult question. The point is, the opening that started in the 80s is probably not that bad. You reach a lot more people. It's a lot less restricted. It's also a lot of fun because there's so much happening. You don't know how to reduce the size. So do you tell people, oh, you want to get involved? But no, we don't do that. We already have 400 members and there's only 800 that can come to the Congress. That's the question. If you want to be there for everyone, if you want to be open, you can hardly reduce the size. I think the question is directed at the people who knew the 80s club. But on the other hand, if you remember back, everything was better. Yeah. So maybe as somebody who was a bit there in the beginning years, and then for a long time, I wasn't because I was interested in other things. And then since like five or six years, I'm back here. But I was very surprised how much similarity there still is with the first couple of Congresses. Of course, it's a very much different kind of event. The 200, 300 people that were there for the first time, as opposed to the 10,000 or maybe 17,000 in Leipzig. But the vibe and the feeling is very similar. And what happens and the people that walk around there, I think for me, I think it's an absolute win. More people is better than less people. Final in normal people. And I'm finally reading the EV has never gotten a non-profit status. EV, by the way, is registered association. A bunch of CCC associated organizations have not gotten non-profit status. Yeah, I'm a bit confused myself right now. I think the reasoning for the EV, the registered association, is that the legal things like have to be clear. Okay, so for a very specific question about myths, I will read it just like it is. So, for the two C3, the second Congress, there were two bomb threats, and then the event had to be cleared. Was ever resolved who posted them? And if that maybe was a smart fluke insulated by Vau? I do not know that. Unfortunately, I don't know. I can remember the clearing of the event, and I think there was a call coming in and the phone central where somebody talked something about bombs that they hid in the building. And I don't think Vau came up with this, but it doesn't really fit with what I learned about Vau. It wouldn't really fit. But I don't know who was behind that if it was the joke or if it was real. Yeah, the clearing also didn't take very long. The people that knew a lot about this, and especially some of them were in the volunteer fire brigade, and they searched the entire building and weren't able to find anything. And after a quarter hour, everything was clear again. And there's another correction. The fact that I said that the Vau Holland foundation would be a non-profit is apparently also wrong. Apparently, it has been reapproved and it is now a non-profit and can receive donations that are tax-deductible. So yeah, we don't want to not mention that. Please donate. So I'll have a look at the clock right now. I think the time slot is over right now. But if you want, you can come to the extended Q&A session in Big Blue Button. You can come there. That's where Julia and I will be for a bit more time. We would like to talk to you and ask some more questions. The link for that you will find at Hamburg.ccc.de. It's the first blog post. There's a big link to our wiki page. I will not read that URL because it's too complicated. And that's also where this Big Blue Button room is linked. The important thing is you need to be registered in the RC3 world. You will only get in there with a ticket. And I hope he will come along and we can talk a bit more about it. And I will again say thank you very much Julia for this talk, for the great answers to the interesting questions. And I hope we can greet you again with more information about the RC3 world.