Rop Gonggrijp
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Rop Gonggrijp is a Dutch hacker and one of the founders of internet service provider XS4ALL.
Gonggrijp was editor in chief of the Internet magazine Hack-Tic. The Dutch police as well as the American CIA once believed him to be a major security threat. In the colophon of Hack-Tic, Gonggrijp was credited as hoofdverdachte ('main suspect'). He was convinced that the Internet would radically alter society.
In 1993, a few Hack-Tic members including Gonggrijp founded XS4ALL. It was the first ISP that offered access to individuals in the Netherlands. Rop Gonggrijp left the company in 1996 as he did not like working in such a large organisation that XS4ALL had become. Later that year, he organised Hacking at the End of the Universe, the first in a series of outdoor hacker conferences.
After he left XS4ALL, Gonggrijp founded ITSX, a computer security systems company, which was bought by Madison Gurkha in 2006. Currently, Gonggrijp owns a company that specialises in cryptophones, mobile telephones that can communicate with other cryptophones over an encrypted line.
Gonggrijp is also still involved in organising hacker conferences, such as What the Hack in 2005. He has repeatedly shown his concerns about the increasing amount of information on individuals that government agencies and companies have access to. Rop held a controversial talk titled "We lost the war"[1] at the Chaos Communication Congress 2005 in Berlin together with Frank Rieger.[2]
At the moment he is active in the group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines") which showed in October 2006 in Dutch television how a electronic voting machine from manufacturer Nedap could easily be hacked.
