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FoeBuD e.V.
FoeBuD — joining the net, intelligence, and civil rights ‘Club of friendly geniuses’
It all began in 1985, with an exhibition “Chaos Computer Club as a Piece of Media Art” in the gallery Art d'Ameublement in Bielefeld. The location of artist duo Rena Tangens and padeluun became a hub where the right people met at the right place and time. For continued meetings and exchanges, they initiated the PUBLIC DOMAIN series. In 1987, dedicated participants of these events created FoeBuD, the “Association for Promotion of Public Movable and Immovable Data Traffic”.
As shown by the deliberate clumsiness of its name, the founders got to work with seriousness as well as humour. The name was a parody on the grotesque abbreviations of the German Federal Post Office, which was responsible for telecommunications at that time and had gems on offer such as “FeTAp with GebAnz” — “telephone table apparatus with charge indicator”. The main objective of the registered charity is to make technology democracy-compatible and communication free for a more liveable modern world. In more than two decades of dedicated voluntary work, the FoeBuD team developed many ideas and theories, succeeded in putting some of them into practice and thus earned its nickname, “club of friendly geniuses”. The idea of creating the club’s own communication system quickly evolved at PUBLIC DOMAIN meetings. FoeBuD established a local bulletin board — BIONIC. This soon became an important part of the decentralized and democratically organized civic network “Zerberus” with its overlay networks “/CL-net” and “SoliNet”. The basic idea was to enable communication with simple technology and at low cost. Important principles in network design and software development were free thinking, independence and data security. All personal messages were encrypted. International attention was later attracted by the Zerberus-based “ZaMir Transnational Network”, which during the war in former Yugoslavia provided peace, human rights, and media groups with a means of communication with each other and the world — often the only one.
A small crowd that makes a difference
In 1993, FoeBuD wrote the first German manual for the popular encryption software “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP). A self-published book, it has now seen four editions and sold 12,000 copies. The Privacy Card, FoeBuD’s answer to the Payback Card (Germany’s biggest customer loyalty card system), was a successful protest against businesses’ leeching of personal data: 2,000 people went shopping nationwide with the cards, using a single customer number, until the ‘friendly hack’ was published. Finally, the BigBrother Awards generate a lot of media and public attention every year on abuses of data, infringements of civil rights and increasing surveillance tendencies. Recently FoeBuD caused a furore with its educational campaign against RFID ‘spy’ chips on supermarket goods and on tickets for the FIFA 2006 World Championships in Germany. People are often surprised about the multiplicity and complexity of FoeBuD projects and of what the club is able to achieve with only about 60 members. “A small crew of FoeBuDs makes a difference”, says padeluun proudly, “but we also need support — and that means donations.”
