The Hackers Way of Reshaping Policies

Bernadette will talk about a very different way to reshape policies - the hacker way. She will give a short overview on different digital rights groups in Europe, and delve deeper into the German hacker-scene with special emphasis on Chaos Computer Club and their approach to effect change.

The biggest success in the last years was the new fundamental right on digital privacy:

"[The] judges made it clear with their decision that the society has a legitimate interest in the confidentiality and integrity of the IT systems it increasingly depends on and that freedom of thought also exists if ideas are stored on to a computer. The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has been demanding this right to digital privacy for over 25 years. [...] We can only hope that the politicians who only know the internet from print-outs don't need another quarter of a century until they have taken this new fundamental right on board, Dirk Engling, the CCC’s spokesman, commented. [...]
The Federal Constitutional Court has provided humanity's virtual self with a digital protective shield. [...]
The judges also determined that informational self-protection through encryption is a right that may only be abrogated under very strict conditions. [...]
However, we don't expect Wolfgang Schäuble (the Federal Interior Minister) or Dieter Wiefelspütz (the German Social Democratic Party’s expert on domestic policy) to suddenly take our constitution seriously. The new basic right will only come to life if it is aggressively defended and exercised." (Quoted from the press release from February 2008)

So, that means this is an ongoing process. Bernadette will also tell about how the Government went on, too, and what the CCC found out about it... and how it got public.