Missing Link: What actually happened to Cryptoparties?

It must have been in 2013 when I met Alice and Bob.

A year or two earlier, I had discovered the local Chaos Computer Club (CCC) circle of experience – basement rooms, flashing LEDs, mate bottles. Disused sofas on which I wrote the Python code for my master’s thesis with the laptop on my knees.

Self-determined use of technology and a healthy distrust of authority have always been part of the CCC culture. When the Snowden revelations in 2013 made it clear to what extent international secret services were collecting data about all of us online, the others who were sitting on the sofas with me reacted callously at first glance – “it was clear”.

But little by little, a new urgency took hold: What can we do to protect ourselves and others? Our privacy, ourselves from the access of those in power?

From Australia to the Ruhr area

One possible answer: Cryptoparties. Born in Australia in 2012 following the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill of 2011, the idea of ​​the Cryptoparty had spread internationally just a few weeks later. The first crypto parties also took place in Germany – including in the Ruhr area, where I sat on the sofa of a CCC Erfa – in 2012. However, public interest was still low.

That changed in 2013, when the huge media attention to the Snowden revelations also extended to possible measures against self-surveillance. Magazines and online portals wanted to report on encrypted communication, even if it was an unwieldy technical topic.

So these were the circumstances under which crypto parties first became mainstream in 2013 – something that politically interested people had at least heard of, even if they weren’t otherwise interested in technology.

I got a taste of an event like this: people of different ages were sitting there with their equally different laptops. A few people walked around pointing at screens, explaining what an email client even was or why open source was safer than proprietary software. The word “key” kept coming up. It was about encrypted messengers like Threema, encrypted emails, and for advanced users also about Tor and hard drive encryption.

I read up on the topic and realized: I want to help. There were enough opportunities, various organizations asked Cryptoparties for support. For example, a medical colleague invited my colleagues and I to organize crypto parties at the conferences of two medical professional associations. Compared to other sessions, we had few participants, but very committed ones – almost everyone had already found out about encryption and the security of data on the Internet on their own, had tried out one or another plugin, and had lively discussions about the political direction in which the digitalization of the healthcare system would take in the coming years.

And again and again it came back to the core problem of the Cryptoparty: How can you make encryption simple and suitable for everyday use? Or to put it another way: How much inconvenience do people accept in order to protect themselves from a danger that is initially not very concrete?

How do you explain encryption?

And this is where Alice and Bob come into play. 2013 was the year in which interested people without a technology background were able to get to know each other for the first time: two fictional characters who were supposed to make the abstract field of cryptography – i.e. encryption and signing of messages – a little more human and clear.

Alice and Bob are much older than Cryptoparties: they were introduced into the literature in 1978 by cryptographers Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman, the developers of the RSA algorithm. They represent senders and receivers who want to communicate confidentially with each other. There are also various opponents who want to listen in, falsify or otherwise disrupt the correspondence between Alice and Bob – Eve, for example, the eavesdropper, or Mallory, who wants to manipulate the content of the messages.

Since the 1980s, cryptography has developed from a predominantly technical issue to a social issue that has a political impact. In the 1990s, governments, companies, civil rights groups and hackers argued over whether strong encryption should be freely available or whether states could force access.

Eric Hughes published “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” in 1993 and got involved in the so-called Crypto Wars. The cypherpunks believe encryption is a prerequisite for a truly free society.

At the first crypto parties we were able to refer to freely accessible information on the Internet. However, the sources there that explained the basics of asymmetric encryption were mostly in English, for example from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Then we worked with self-made flyers, referred to German-language sources, such as the Digitalcourage eV website, or showed presentations. Eventually it became a book: “Well prepared against surveillance on the web: How to send encrypted emails, chat and surf” was published in 2015.

It’s about digital self-defense. On the one hand, even technical laypeople can learn basic measures, but on the other hand, secure communication and secure surfing are always a little more complicated than foregoing all security measures. There will be no absolute security, but with a few simple measures it can be significantly increased.

The book didn’t become a bestseller, but when pirated copies of the book appeared as PDFs on the relevant pages, we also counted that as a success: people became interested in the topic. But what happened to the initial interest?