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THE ILLUMINATE CONSPIRACY

by hacking into NORAD – which proved peculiarly influential in Germany. By the mid-1980s the Germans were second only to the Americans in the number of hackers and their audacity. The national computer networks were all compromised; German hackers would later turn up on systems all over the world.

The growth of the computer underworld was nurtured by sustained media coverage and the quasi-institutionalization of hacking. In Germany many things are organized, even anarchy. So, in a parody of Teutonic orderliness, hackers assembled into clubs: there was the BHP (the Bayrische Hackerpost) in Munich, Foebud-Bi in Bielefeld, Suecrates-S in Stuttgart, and HICop-CE (the Headquarters of the Independent Computer-Freaks) in Celle. The most famous and probably the best-organized of all was the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg. Founded in 1981, it spawned affiliates in other towns and cities, even a branch in France, and in 1984 it hosted the first of its annual conferences in Hamburg, an event which served to keep the Chaos name in the press. In between the annual congresses, Chaos ran national hacker meets to coincide with various computer exhibitions held around Germany. Whatever the event, the venue for the hacker meet was always next to the stand occupied by the Bundespost (the German Post Office), and the time was always 4 p.m. on the first Tuesday of the exhibition.

Chaos was never a huge organization – even now it has only about 150 registered members – but it was accomplished at self-promotion and zealous in disseminating information on hacking. It publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Die Datenschleuder (literally, ‘the Distribution of Data by Centrifuge’), with sixteen to twenty pages an issue. It also promotes Die Hackerbibel (‘The Hacker Bible’), a two-part set of reference books detailing hacker techniques.

Chaos first came to the notice of the general public in 1984, when it hacked into the German computer information system, Btx (Bildschirmtext).¹ Like all telephone and data services in Germany, the system is run by the Bundespost, an unloved, bureaucratic institution that is obsessive in its attempts to control all national telecommunications links. The company added to its unpopularity with hackers when it began licensing telephone answering machines and regulating the use of modems.

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