At the end of the 1980s, a new association tried to unite French hackers. This is the Chaos Computer Club France. But for whose benefit?
On this day, at the end of the 1980s, place du Colonel-Fabien, next to the headquarters of the French Communist Party, there is a visitor for Marc Olanié. This scientific journalist then works for the Individual Computer. It is one of the key monthlies of this prosperous era for the paper computer press. The one who asks for it is Jean-Bernard Condat, later known under the pseudonym of ” Cucumber “. The visitor quickly puts his feet in the dish. At the Chaos Computer Club, he was told that Marc was among the members. Would he also like to be part of the Chaos Computer Club France, which he is setting up?
The hairs of Marc Olanié, a passionate radio amateur who tweaks electronics, then one of the rare French people to connect to the nascent Internet by radio, immediately bristle. The Chaos Computer Club, this association of hackers launched in Berlin in the early 1980s, would never have fun disseminating information about its members! It would be a shame. The group precisely campaigns for a very high level of privacy protection. “There were a lot of worrying signalshe tells Numerama. I did not join and I warned the friends. »
The CCC France, false nose of the DST?
Well seen ! Because the Chaos Computer Club France is a shady structure to say the least. As the journalist Jean Guisnel, one of the French intelligence specialists, states in his book Wars in cyberspacepublished in 1995, the association is actually a false nose for the police officers of the Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST), the French counterintelligence service — which later became the Direction générale de la Sécurité interne (DGSI ), after its merger with General Intelligence (RG).
At the time, hackers from the Chaos Computer Club worried French counter-spies. They wonder if members of the German club do not ultimately work for the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service. Fears no doubt linked to the incredible story of the hacker Karl Koch, alias hagbard. This member of a group affiliated with the CCC died in murky circumstances in 1989. He is suspected of having hacked into sensitive organizations and of having sold his discoveries to the Soviets.
According to Jean Guisnel, the DST decided at the time to support the creation of a “homegrown pirate club”. The mission of Jean-Bernard Condat, a young man from the south of France already in the sights of this intelligence service for a story of phreaking, these hacks of telephone lines then in vogue, is simple. The former musicology student who loves cooking, helicopters, squash or even patents – a non-exhaustive list – must make himself known to attract this strange and mysterious fauna that gravitates around computers to the new club.
A folklore group of hackers, not really serious
Its media coverage is a success. This young man with short hair and big glasses becomes a good client of the media on computer topics. As for example with this television show, September 17, 1991, where he scares Daniel Bilalian. Incidentally, according to his detractors, he takes credit for feats of arms committed by others. Such as this hacking of an SNCF server which made it possible to reserve all the places on a TGV.
Thirty years later, Marc Olanié nevertheless severely judges the operation attributed to the DST. “Nobody serious could take the bait. This type of initiative could only attract newcomers to the community or people who were too naive”. “The less suspicious consider the CCCF as a folklore group, while its collaboration with the police is suspected by some paranoiacs, but we believe it without believing it, reputations are so quickly made”, summarizes Jean Guisnel in his book. French hackers will regret a bad story that “gunned down the movement for several years, a kind of rotten legacy”will say for example a hacker named sub.
However, if Jean-Bernard Condat claims later in an interview for the Zataz site the realization of 1,482 files on French hackers through the CCCF, the Ministry of the Interior denies having hired him. “This gentleman is known to our services, particularly in the field of computer hacking, but he appears to us to be a wacky and relatively unreliable character. And above all, he has never worked with us! »replies Place Beauvau ten years later to Les Échos about Jean-Bernard Condat.
In support of the Ministry of the Interior, one can notice that the former leader of the CCCF gets tangled up in the numbers. For example, he claims to have written only a thousand files in confidences in 1995 to the specialized publication Le Monde du Renseignement.
“A little helpless”
So was Jean-Bernard Condat really an indicator or was his role inflated? Difficult to decide, the truth may be somewhere between the two. But whatever the case, journalist Marc Olanié retrospectively believes that the interest of French counterintelligence for hackers was legitimate. “But what shocked us was the way of doing it, in a loucéde like that”. “We could clearly see that the DST people didn’t understand anything about it and that they were looking to find skills as quickly as possible”also remembers Lionel Bruno, the administrator of a bulletin board, the BBS Suptel, a time approached by police officers.
“We are dealing with a new population, we are a little helpless”admitted Daniel Martin, the creator of the IT department of the DST, in the documentary “A Counter-History of the Internet”. The former civil servant then specified how his former service had recruited “whales” – the internal nickname of the computer hackers – by drawing on the conscripts doing their national service. The recruitment of well-wired geeks is still one of the priorities of the intelligence services today.
After having been talked about again by trying to launch a company for securing registered letters, Jean-Bernard Condat will gradually disappear from the radar, briefly returning to the news through a lawsuit brought against the prud’hommes against the parish where he played the organ. Ironically, his own blog appears to have been hacked. A height.