The Political Congress

The political hackers, armed with technology, tackle presumed and genuine issues in society, leaking secret information and demonstrating political commitment to civil rights. This work is often less spectacular than popular TV series and movies suggest and involves a huge amount of work.

For example, Matthew Garrett is not only a free software developer, but also a political activist as a representative of the Free Software Foundation. In his keynote (Figure 1) he painstakingly described the obstacles to protecting current hardware against criminals or government secret services and talked about Intel's Management Engine and TPM (trusted platform module). Other contributions looked at various forms of state supervision or digital politics. For example, cellphone monitoring in Iran, Internet censorship worldwide, and the new European rules on network neutrality [3].

Figure 1: Matthew Garrett explaining at 32C3 the numerous obstacles that face people trying to build a secure hardware platform. TPM is part of the solution, according to Garret.

Although attendees often have an above-average interest in political commitment, their primary interest is in experimenting with technology and testing individual degrees of freedom. Because the Congress is welcoming to new attendees, it is increasingly becoming representative of the general population. One positive expression of this is the considerably greater number of female attendees than at similar technology events, as well as a well-developed program for children. However, this broad appeal does not make the Congress a lame duck: Apple censored no fewer than eight Congress videos in the CCC TV app for Apple TV [6].

Although only a few visitors fit the widespread and popular bill of the digital freedom fighter, you can safely assume that large parts of the community are sympathetic to such political activists. For example, the Congress reported a record number of visitors after the Snowden revelations, and the tickets for 2015 sold out very quickly.

Starting in 2017, the event needs to find a new venue, with remodeling, modernization, and expansion construction planned for the current venue, the Congress Center Hamburg (CCH), through 2018 and into 2019.