Die Datenschleuder

Die Datenschleuder (roughly "the data slingshot" or "data catapult") is the print magazine of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Germany's largest hacker association. It has been published since 1984, three years after the CCC itself was founded in West Berlin in 1981, and describes itself on its masthead as "das wissenschaftliche Fachblatt für Datenreisende" ("the scientific journal for data travelers") and "ein Organ des Chaos Computer Club" ("an organ of the Chaos Computer Club"). German-language Wikipedia attributes the founding to CCC co-founder Herwart "Wau" Holland-Moritz, though this specific attribution is less consistently documented across sources and should be treated as reasonably well-sourced but not exhaustively corroborated.

Format and Publication

The magazine is produced in DIN A5 format and is nominally biannual, though its actual publication schedule has long been irregular ("unregelmäßig, geplant: halbjährlich" — "irregular, planned: twice yearly"). It carries the ISSN 0930-1054 for both print and online editions. Editorial work is coordinated online by volunteers, while printing and distribution are handled centrally by the CCC in Hamburg; the magazine can be subscribed to independently of CCC membership. Back issues — more than one hundred by the mid-2020s — are freely archived online at ds.ccc.de, with digital availability dating to 2002.

Content and Notable Issues

Content spans both technical material (early phone phreaking and computer-security techniques, later cryptography, network security, and software) and political commentary on information freedom, data protection, video surveillance, and civil liberties. Commentators have compared its blend of technical how-to and countercultural political protest to the U.S. magazine TAP (originally the Youth International Party Line), active from 1971 into the 1980s. One of the magazine's most widely cited moments came with issue #92 (March 2008), which included a reproducible foil of German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble's fingerprint, lifted from a water glass, as a protest against biometric data collection and the minister's surveillance-friendly policies — an episode also documented in mainstream German press coverage at the time.

Relationship to the CCC and Legacy

As the CCC's official organ, Die Datenschleuder functioned for decades as one of the primary channels through which the club communicated its research, positions on data-protection law, and internal community news, predating the club's web presence and continuing alongside it. It remains listed among the CCC's core ongoing projects. Editorial leadership has been associated with figures such as Hanno "Rince" Wagner in more recent years, though editorship has rotated over the publication's history and complete editorial records are not fully documented in publicly available secondary sources.

Timeline

• 1981-09-12The Chaos Computer Club is founded in West Berlin (context for the magazine's later founding; see the CCC entry).
• 1984Die Datenschleuder begins publication as the CCC's official print magazine, the same year the CCC carried out its widely publicized Bildschirmtext (BTX) security demonstration.
• 2002Back issues of the magazine become available online at ds.ccc.de.
• 2008-03Issue #92 is published, including a reproducible fingerprint foil of German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble as a protest against biometric surveillance policy.
• 2009-03The CCC reintroduces an eight-issue mini-subscription option for the magazine.