Since 1985, some chapters in Switzerland have organized an independent sister association called the Chaos Computer Club Schweiz [de] (CCC-CH) instead.

The CCC describes itself as "a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information…".

Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free universal access to computers and technological infrastructure as well as the use of open-source software.

[6] The CCC frequently criticizes new legislation and products with weak information security which endanger citizen rights or the privacy of users.

Notable members of the CCC regularly function as expert witnesses for the German constitutional court, organize lawsuits and campaigns, or otherwise influence the political process.

One of the spokespersons of the CCC, as of 1986, Andy Müller-Maguhn, was a member of the executive committee of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) between 2000 and 2002.

The CCC was founded in West Berlin on 12 September 1981 at a table which had previously belonged to the Kommune 1 in the rooms of the newspaper Die Tageszeitung by Wau Holland and others in anticipation of the prominent role that information technology would play in the way people live and communicate.

The CCC became world-famous in 1984 when they drew public attention to the security flaws of the German Bildschirmtext computer network by causing it to debit DM 134,000 (equivalent to €131,600 in 2021) in a Hamburg bank in favor of the club.

Bildschirmtext was the biggest commercially available online system targeted at the general public in its region at that time, run and heavily advertised by the German telecommunications agency Deutsche Bundespost which also strove to keep up-to-date alternatives out of the market.

A group of German hackers led by Karl Koch, who was loosely affiliated with the CCC, was arrested for breaking into US government and corporate computers, and then selling operating-system source code to the Soviet KGB.

[17] In 2001, the CCC celebrated its twentieth birthday with an interactive light installation dubbed Project Blinkenlights that turned the building Haus des Lehrers in Berlin into a giant computer screen.

The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has ruled that the police may only use such programs for telephony wiretapping, and for no other purpose, and that this restriction should be enforced through technical and legal means.

The software was found to have the ability to remote control the target computer, to capture screenshots, and to fetch and run arbitrary extra code.

From a photograph of the user's fingerprint on a glass surface, using "easy everyday means",[36] the biometrics hacking team of the CCC was able to unlock an iPhone 5S.

[37] However, in some cases, using a high resolution photograph of the phone owner's iris and a lens, the CCC claimed to be able to trick the authentication system.