Skip to content
Businessweek
Feature/ Global Tech

The Hackers Russia-Proofing Germany’s Elections

The Chaos Computer Club, a multigenerational army of activists, has made the country’s democracy a lot tougher to undermine.
At its Goulash Programming Night in May, CCC ran a pop-up, high-capacity network to meet 800 hackers’ bandwidth needs, while mammoth drums of stew filled their bellies.

At its Goulash Programming Night in May, CCC ran a pop-up, high-capacity network to meet 800 hackers’ bandwidth needs, while mammoth drums of stew filled their bellies.

Photographer: Antoine Bruy for Bloomberg Businessweek

The hack began as trash talk. Germany’s voting computers were so vulnerable to tampering that they could be reprogrammed to play chess, the hackers boasted. But then the machines’ maker dared them to try. Bound by honor and curiosity, the hackers got their hands on one of the computers and had it playing chess after about a month. “We have to admit,” they later wrote, “that it does not play chess all that well.”

This wasn’t just a prank. The hackers, several of them associated with the Hamburg collective known as the Chaos Computer Club, or CCC, also proved they could manipulate votes that the computers had recorded. As a result, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court struck down the nation’s use of voting computers, citing CCC by name in its ruling. Oh, and this was in 2006.