The Dutch hacker camps run on a four-year clock, like the Olympics, and the lineage is long. It began in 1989 with the Galactic Hacker Party at Amsterdam's Paradiso, organized by the Hack-Tic collective around editor Rop Gonggrijp. Then came Hacking at the End of the Universe (1993) in the polder near Lelystad, Hacking In Progress (1997) in Almere, Hackers At Large (2001) in Enschede, What the Hack (2005), Hacking at Random (2009), Observe. Hack. Make. (2013), Still Hacking Anyway (2017) and most recently May Contain Hackers (2022). The same volunteers age through the series, hand it to younger volunteers, and keep building it bigger. SHA2017 was the eighth gathering in that chain - and the title was a wry acknowledgement that 28 years of surveillance scandals, crypto wars and platform consolidation had not, in fact, stopped anyone from hacking.

The choice of venue was very Dutch and very practical. Scoutinglandgoed Zeewolde - a wooded scout property on reclaimed Flevoland soil, 55 km east of Amsterdam - had the trees, the fields, the access roads and the bathrooms to host a small city for a week. From 4 to 8 August 2017, that small city went up. Datacentres rose in shipping containers. Fibre runs were trenched between tents. Datenklos - the German hacker community's nickname for chemical toilets repurposed as network closets - sprouted with gigabit Ethernet switches inside, so any participant within reach of one could plug a laptop directly into the camp backbone. The camp ran its own DECT phone network, its own GSM cell, and an FM radio station broadcasting under a Dutch license. It was, briefly, one of the most densely networked square kilometres in Europe.

The talks were the spine of the event, and the lineup leaned hard into civil-liberties and cryptography history. Phil Zimmermann, the engineer who released Pretty Good Privacy in 1991 and then spent the next three years under federal investigation for arms-export violations, came to remind a younger audience how the first crypto war had actually been fought. William Binney, the former NSA technical director turned whistleblower, gave a talk titled How the NSA Tracks You that walked through the agency's bulk collection architecture as he had built and then disowned it. In between, hundreds of shorter talks rolled across multiple tents: lock-picking, satellite reverse-engineering, biohacking, retrocomputing, the legal status of car firmware. Everything was livestreamed and archived on the Chaos Computer Club's media portal, where the talks still live.

The visible texture of a Dutch hacker camp comes from its villages - clusters of tents organized around a theme or a community, with names painted on flags and dinner cooked communally. SHA2017 had villages for individual hackerspaces, for makers, for the queer hacker community, for retrocomputing, for music, for kids. Most attendees received an electronic badge - a small, programmable device that doubled as a name tag, an IR transmitter and a battery-powered toy - and within hours people were hacking the badges. They were also hacking other things. An Italian researcher arrived hoping someone would help him probe a Tesla. A team of journalists demonstrated taking remote control of a Dutch fire truck. The stories made the Dutch national news. By the time the tents came down on 8 August, the camp had behaved exactly as a hacker camp is supposed to behave: curious, prankish, mostly harmless, and uncomfortably good at finding things companies wished it would not.

SHA2017 left almost nothing physical behind. The fibre came up, the Datenklos rolled away, the scouts got their terrain back. What stayed was a network - the kind that hacker camps are really for. People who met in line for coffee at the heaven tent that August found themselves running European cryptography NGOs together a few years later. The badge code they wrote on the train home turned into an open-source platform that shipped at the next camp. The talks the CCC archived became evidence in policy debates from Berlin to Brussels. The four-year clock kept ticking, and in 2022 the same volunteers, a few weeks older, did it all again as May Contain Hackers. Still hacking. Still anyway.