3 AUGUST 1989: THE HACKER IN THE LION'S DEN

It was very crowded in Paradiso because the GHP had been on the national news the day before. In the morning John Draper, alias Captain Crunch, demonstrated his findings about how the Russian phone system was structured. Around lunchtime the debate about espionage started between Pengo, an alias for the 21-year-old Hans Heubner, and Wau Holland, one of the founders of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. Pengo, who was a member of the Chaos Computer Club, was accused of having sold commercially sensitive information to the KGB and because of this he became an item in the world news. Wau Holland wanted to excommunicate Pengo from the CCC because he had broken the trust within the CCC by selling information he had obtained via the CCC. According to Wau, Pengo had broken the hacker ethic. Pengo argued that he had never noticed anything of a hacker ethic, that he had met a lot of young boys who were fascinated by technology. He declared not to be proud of what he had done, but also argued that he did not see the difference between working for a large company and working for a secret service. "The fascination with technology easily led to a fascination with power. Hacking computer systems is a sort of unreal pleasure and the KGB agent made this all very real. It was as if I had become the star in my own espionage movie." (Riemens, 1989). New Zealand asked the question of whether it was not the systems operators who are responsible. Wau and Pengo agreed that would be too easy, then all data would belong to everyone since most sysops are not capable of preventing hacks. The chair closed the debate with the proclamation that all people have the right to make mistakes, which triggered applause from the audience (Gonggrijp 1989). In the workshop that afternoon, led by Steffen Wernery^{note 117} and John Draper about secret services, this debate continued. Over 100 people participated and a lot of stories were shared about the functioning of the National Security Agency in the USA, Interpol and others. Gonggrijp remarks in his report that he recognized quite a number of Dutch intelligence people, who according to him were enjoying a great 'course', listening in and hanging around in the hack room, for only 25 guilders (Gonggrijp 1989, 31). Later that afternoon in the show "Information under and as a threat" Nazi-software was shown by Suzan Ugursoy from Koln.^{note 118} Issues were raised about what to do when such games were available via the Internet. Why show them on the GHP? Should fascist software be banned or should it be shown? Peter Klerks and Werner Pieper emphasized that 'knowledge is power'. Especially when this knowledge is aggregated by computers into large data sets about people, this power has to be broken. Hackers and political activists do have a task here that is important for the democratic development of societies (Riemens 1989). Late in the afternoon Daniel de Roulet, who is a medical ICT specialist from Switzerland, presented P.M.'s novel Bolo Bolo. Bolo Bolo is a utopian novel that has influenced the thinking about networks profoundly.^{note 119}

The game night that evening did not take place, as it should have done. With all the hassle to make the technology work, with so many guests, and a lot of press attention in the previous days, we had not prepared this night well and the technology did not work as it should have. The good thing was that The Art Heafties, a group of Amsterdam based technology and media artists, who also had a special place in the basement for all three days, which was full of sound and images, filled the big screen in a sort of VJ session avant la lettre. Their slogan was "Information is Deformation".