Mit seiner Spionage für Russland, insbesondere dem sogenannten "KGB-Hack", erlangte Karl Koch in den 80er Jahren fragwürdige Berühmtheit. Sein grausamer Tod im Jahr 1989 gibt bis heute Rätsel auf. Verfilmt wurde seine Geschichte 1998 in Hans-Christian Schmids Kinofilm "23 – Nichts ist so wie es scheint".

In 1981, Wau Holland and other hackers established the Hamburg based Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The idiosyncratic freethinkers were inspired by Californian technology visionaries and committed themselves to hacker ethics. All information must be free. Use public data, protect private data. But not everyone followed the rules. Computer technology was still in its infancy and the emerging Internet became a projection screen for social utopias. What has become of them? The story of the German hackers, told by the protagonists themselves in a montage of found video and audio material.