Ladies and gentlemen, and variations thereupon, welcome to the 38th Chaos Communication Congress.
My name is Gabriela. And my name is Aline.
And welcome to this edition, which is called Illegal Instructions.
Why is it called Illegal Instructions? There are different layers, of course.
If you've ever looked into a memory corruption issue, trying to exploit it, this is a very good moment, right?
You suddenly got control of the instruction pointer.
You can get the computer to do things it was never supposed to do.
It is when you're taking control. Of course, there's a different aspect.
And when I was asked to open this Congress, usually it would be a reason to celebrate. Mind you.
I personally have reasons to celebrate. But this one is difficult.
It's tough because we're not living in good times. We're living in difficult times.
Fascism is coming. And we need to prepare for that.
And that is the second meaning of the motto of this year, Illegal Instructions, because there's only so much you can do.
And by holding signs up and protesting, sometimes you have to take more direct action.
And we want to talk about why and how to take those actions.
And we want to give you the tools to take action. So this is why we're here today.
It's very unfortunate that the threat to democracy, the threat to freedom is coming from an ideology.
That's actually what we're here for. actually not too distant from the one that started our organization, our journey.
It's both rooted in the hacker culture, in the culture of liberty, of free information exchange, but somewhere the ways have diverted.
You have people like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel, who have traveled down the path from liberty to libertarian to fascist to neo-reactionary ideas, who have come out and started to buy countries, buy democracy.
That's very dangerous. I'd like to give you motivation of why we are different later today.
For now, I'd like to pass over to my colleague Aline for a little introduction.
Well, the occasion might be grim, but I'm so excited to be here, because this is actually my first time.
I've heard so much about the Congress, about the stories, about this being a place for solidarity, about resistance.
You might have guessed I'm stepping in for Felix, who unfortunately cannot be here here today, but he's sending his warm regards and hopefully can join us in the next few days.
I'm grateful that this community is open to people like me who are here for the very first time.
And I know I can trust all of you to help me find my way around. I can ask questions.
I can ask for explanations.
And again, I would like to know who of you is here with me for the very first time.
Raise your hands. Great.
I've heard from many people that actually the very first time is the most exciting experience because there's so much new to discover and to learn.
We are all welcome here because this is not about knowing how to write in C++ or to understand everything about technology.
This is a place where you can actually learn from each other and learn to work together.
And this is the spirit I've heard about in so many stories about the congress.
And now this is what I want to learn from you.
I want to hear what you think about this year's motto. Illegal instructions.
Because I believe all of us can try to do a little bit more to resist.
And to put into practice the idea that we are here for each other. We are here for each other.
We are here for each idea of, well, finding different ways to resist the changes that Ela just described.
In the past year, I personally tried to denormalize the presence of the AFD in Parliament.
I refused them an answer when I was invited as an expert to Parliament, and even that small action triggered a stark response by the AFD.
They escalated this and demanded being treated in the same way as any democratic party.
I will spare you the details, but I was surprised by how many people actually gave in to their claim and sided with them.
But also, on the positive side, this created an opportunity for solidarity and for joint action.
Joint action like this open letter here.
There, people got together to resist together people who otherwise would have never met.
As you probably know, this is not my first Congress.
And I was thinking about what was my first Congress, and I figured out that isn't so easy to explain without going a bit into my personal history.
It's the history of the CCC. It's also the history of system change.
And all started out in this place. This is East Berlin. I grew up in East Berlin.
I was very fortunate to have had access to a computer, but I also enjoyed the benefits of an education system that was, compared to the rest of the country, very well funded.
So, the Pioneer Palace, the Palace of the Youth, was an institution here in Berlin, where you could go to as a kid, like nine, ten year old, learn how to drive a train, a proper train, a big one, not a model train.
I learned soldering there when I was ten, and there was this place where you could learn about computers that I ended up visiting once a week.
This is where I learned programming.
This is where I learned assembler language, and also, there wasn't an internet back then, right?
We didn't even have modems, so we had huge boxes, huge crates of floppy disks, and we started copying software, and sometimes it had pesky copy protection.
So, this was also where I learned, at the tender age of 12, how to create copy protection schemes, how a debugger works, and all the interesting stuff you need.
And later, we moved to a different place.
More to the center of the city, the House of the Young Talents. House of the Young Talents.
That's an institution that was paid for by the city of Berlin, and there was also a computer club there, where we met once a week.
People a little bit older, stories familiar, everybody brought their computers, everybody brought their floppies.
We copied software, we learned about stuff, and it sort of was a hackerspace in the 80s.
This is how I grew up.
And this was in the East, it was a different system, and, of course, the Secret Service watched all that.
This is from a report on private computer use, so they tracked every single private owner of a computer.
And they also started discussing the risk of having a telecommunication system.
So this is talking about acoustic couplers, and that this would allow for uncontrolled data exchange within non-socialist economic areas, the NSW.
And they're sort of very afraid of that.
My father, who got me my computer, also warned me, like, there's a modem, do not connect that to the phone.
The Stasi doesn't like it. He was right, of course.
We also had an EM, which is the inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, the inofficial employee of the Staatssicherheit, who reported about our computer meeting.
Fortunately, he absolutely had no clue what we were doing.
And so, the only thing he reported as being questionable is that, you know, someone had a copy of a game called Raid on Moscow.
Then, November 1989, you're familiar with the events.
In February 1990, the Chaos Computer Club came to us, to the HDR team.
And we did a Congress together, February 1990. It was called CoCon, Communication Congress.
This was a wordplay on the Treaty on Export Ban for Computers to the East, which was called CoCom with a C.
And my first contact with the CCC, I spent all the time, I mean, I was like 15 years old at the time.
I spent all my time in the library. I was reading all the books because I couldn't buy them.
I didn't have the proper money yet. So, unfortunately, I missed some of the interesting talks.
There was one where a Professor Fels, East German IT professor, debated a famous lawyer from Munich called Gravenreuth on whether there should be copyright on software or not.
I still think they shouldn't.
That's the opening panel, you see Stefan Sebald, who was running the HDRT Computer Club.
Steffen Van Eri, Wau Holland should be familiar.
That's a still from a video and what Wau Holland is discussing there, that when the CCC was founded in 1984 at the table of Kommune 1 in the Taz office, there also was a Verfassungsschutz present.
Right. Hackers in the West were also surveilled.
They also didn't trust them, maybe for good reasons.
My first Congress Congress was 1994, 30 years ago. This one was in Berlin.
There was that place called art plus comm where like half of the CCC worked back then.
They paid us. And the interesting thing is I was immediately. Integrated into the organization.
So I was handing the speakers, trying to get the speakers to their slots from day one.
I also had a talk.
I explained how the phone system works, how freaking works, how not to pay money for for making phone calls.
And we've come a long way since then. 30 years.
I'm happy to have seen the Congress grow, but I'm also happy that we are still getting in new people.
We are not a closed circle. We are an open organization.
We want to have people here and I'm glad this still works. I'm glad new people are coming in.
I'm glad we still keep sharing knowledge and I'm also glad we are still keeping the spirit of the organization, the tradition.
So maybe one more thing. I opened with fascism is coming.
I've seen system change and I still distinctly remember how people were like in shock and awe.
They couldn't imagine such drastic changes happening. And this is also what I see today.
I see people saying it's not going to be that bad. We'll cope. We'll survive.
No, not everyone will survive. People are already dying. Women who don't get.
Access to abortion are dying because they're not getting the medical care they deserve and it will get worse.
And it's our duty to do what we can to prevent that and to stop that.
So let us talk about illegal instructions. Let us talk about resistance.
The fascist turn is not a law of nature.
With our actions, we can give hope and we can turn back the tide. We must.
Many people all over the globe have shown in the recent month how to do this.
Let us look to Poland.
Let us look at the feminists who there have led the charge to form a broad alliance to take back the difference.
With including all the Syrians and the Democratic institutions that the government tried to take away from them and threatened to destroy them.
Let us know at the impeachment protesters who recently took to the street in South Korea to prevent being overtaken by an authoritarian state. system.
There, even people who couldn't make it to the streets, supported the movement by sending them food and coffee.
Let us look to our Syrian neighbors who finally have seen their tyrant ousted from power after suffering from decades of oppression and civil war.
This is over.
And right now, our friend Markus from Netzpolitik is on the ground in Georgia, covering the great pro-democracy protests there.
He sent us this picture of Elena, who is joining the protests every day.
And taking her telescope to the protests.
She is saying she is meeting there the greatest people of Georgia, and she wants to give them the opportunity to see the moon up close.
And even here in Germany, at the beginning of the year, we have seen the largest pro-democracy protests in the German history.
Who of you has taken to the streets this year? Raise your hand.
This is the spirit we want to take here. From Chelyabinsk to Hamburg, let us get together.
Use these days to meet new people, form bonds, create solidarity and resilience.
Resistance has many forms. And hacking has always been political.
It is communities like this one who have the responsibility to act because we have the power to act.
Legality cannot remain a central principle when the laws are influenced by those who want to attack human dignity, oppress minorities and destroy democracy.
But the good news... The good news is, hacking fascism is like hacking any system.
We have to find the vulnerabilities, the little cracks, and use them to our benefit.
We have a broad range of tools at our hands. And this is where we start. This is one example.
This is Alexandra El-Bakyan. The she-devil.
She created Sci-Hub, a large shadow library website that grants free access to a lot of knowledge, to a lot of academic articles that would otherwise sit behind paywalls.
She single-handedly took on... She took on... One billion-dollar academic publishing industry.
And she is now in hiding to avoid extradition. That is a great example.
Another option is sabotage of various flavors.
Books and films like this one here, How to Blow up a Pipeline, they have explored in
what ways, actually, the destruction of fossil infrastructure can be used to dissuade the
help us to save the planet, because we know that those infrastructures bring dangers in
many forms.
And maybe closer to this community here, we all know that right now new infrastructures
are being built, data centres, and data centres that take up vast resources in terms of energy,
in terms of water, minerals, rare earths that are extracted under terrible conditions.
I would like to know from you, what would it take us to consider acts of sabotage?
What do you think?
And the next one, the next example is how we can learn from real experts in subverting systems.
This is the CIA. A simple sabotage field manual from 1944 during the Second World War.
They gave advice to citizens how to become effective saboteurs without putting themselves
into too much danger.
It advises them to quote unquote, refer all matters to committees for further study and
consideration, attempt to make committees as large as possible, never less than five.
Another great tip is to haggle over precise wording of communications, minutes, resolutions.
I think we've all experienced that.
And that is something we can all do when we recognise that we are part of systems that
are dysfunctional and even harmful. And I'm sure we can actually do much more.
Let's be creative together. . . So it's okay to choose the right place.
Maybe you're in hiding, you're sabotaging from behind.
Maybe you're running a website distributing information that cannot be traced to you.
Maybe you're on stage. Maybe and I hope it's not getting to that, direct action is necessary.
I still hope we can avoid that situation, but we must remember the people who did.
You must remember that all freedom came with a hefty price.
Marina survived, not many others didn't.
Maybe the most important one, the one that doesn't come with any risks. Do not obey in advance.
Do not bow to the new masters. Make them do it. Make them pay the price.
Make it, make the effort big. . .
And with that, I'm coming to the duty of a bit of housekeeping and introducing you to
the Congress.
As I mentioned, this is a self-organized system, so volunteers are needed to run that.
If you're the first time here, this is also a very good way to get into contact with people,
to understand how the structures work, how to help.
You go to the Engel system, you register, you take a couple of shifts.
You see the numbers of hours that need to be put in, 26,000 hours, imagine having to pay that.
The Congress wouldn't be possible as a commercial enterprise, it would be way too expensive,
nobody would be able to attend. So this is where the community starts here.
I'd be very happy if you could do your part. To find your way around. There's a C3NAV system.
It has a search, you find the different entities and villages there.
If you have lost your way, this will get you back.
It has a website, it has an app, go install that. It will help you find your way.
Then of course, with so many people in one place, bad things can happen.
For medical emergencies, we have the CERT, we have a phone system here, in case you don't know.
If you have a decked phone. You can register it, you can talk.
There's a VoIP client, there's even a GSM client, if you can track someone down with
the right sort of GSM cards.
The 112 for medical emergencies, there's also people running around that you can talk to.
There's an awareness team, if you notice any reasons for conflict.
So we are a very inclusive place, a place that fights against discrimination, that fights
for the rights of people, for minority people. Sometimes people don't play by the rules.
These are the people who can support you.
Then we have a lot of neurodiverse people here, and for some people, being in a crowd
with thousands of people with loud noises and lights can be difficult.
So there's a team that is specialized on taking care of people with autism.
There's a quiet room that you can go to if everything's too loud, if you need to calm down.
They're also there in case of melt-ons, of emergencies.
They know how to deal with that, they're trained. So reach out to them.
And finally, we do have a security crew in case there's someone who needs to be taken off-premise.
We hope they're safe. It's not necessary, but be prepared.
That's a very important one, especially if you're new here, you tend to forget basic
functions like eating, sleeping.
So make sure you're getting six hours of sleep, two meals a day, and one shower.
It used to be called the 3-2-1 rule, but we're all getting older.
And just a couple of comments on the FAR plan, because we're approaching the end of this.
We are here to co-create, not to consume.
So this year's stage program has a lot of content about illegal constructions, but also
how to build communities.
Over the next days, various talks will expose how systems work, bringing transparency to
the European Commission, reverse engineering everything from silicon chips to school chat bots.
Other talks help us to better understand the perspectives of those who usually don't get a voice.
We will hear from refugees who organize against the condition in camps.
We will hear about the state of digitizations in prisons.
And there are stories about unlikely allies, such as a Dutch police officer who blew the
whistle in favor of an activist who was put under surveillance.
Many talks will call for action, some for right here and now, such as on Sunday where
you can swap cash for vouchers with refugees. And of course, there's so much more.
The community stages, the assemblies, the hacker tours. It's too much to cover everything.
And, well, we're not going to cover everything.
We want to make sure you get an opportunity to find your way around here immediately after
this opening, corrective recap, and build on its investigative report that started the
protests earlier this year here in Germany.
And now, all we have left to do is to wish you lots of fun, inspiration, and solidarity.