US hacker and wikileaks supporter jacob appelbaum warned against plans by intelligence agencies to build comprehensive surveillance systems, citing as an example the construction of a large-scale data center by the US intelligence agency NSA in the state of utah.
Appelbaum shouted to the participants: "resist this surveillance state!"According to the organizers, around 6000 computer experts, civil rights activists and net activists will take part in the four-day meeting of the chaos computer club (CCC).
Appelbaum objected to the attitude that only those who deserved it were affected by monitoring measures. "The intention of the NSA data center is to spy on all of us, that’s the reality," said the 29-year-old activist of the hacker group cult of the dead cow. This "attack on humanity" will lead to democracy being put in danger worldwide. Every individual is faced with the decision to "become cold and automated or to work for a better world".
Appelbaum mentioned anonymization techniques such as the tor project and disclosure platforms such as wikileaks as a means of increasing transparency.
The topics of the more than 90 presentations ranged from computer security and copyright law to the need for a network philosophy and the possibilities of circumventing censorship on the internet. The CCC has ranked 29. Chaos communication congress, abbreviated to 29C3, was held under the motto "not my department" – an allusion to the tendency of technicians not to care about responsibility and consequences of their actions. This is nonsense, "the whole world is your area of expertise," said appelbaum. The conference has been held in berlin for the past 13 years and has now been moved to hamburg for organizational reasons.