Gonggrijp was born in Amsterdam. While growing up in Wormer in the DutchZaanstreek area, he became known as a teenage hacker and appeared as one of the main characters in Jan Jacobs's book Kraken en Computers (Hacking and computers, Veen uitgevers 1985, ISBN90-204-2651-6) which describes the early hacker scene in the Netherlands. Moved to Amsterdam in 1988. Founded the hacker magazine Hack-Tic in 1989. He was believed to be a major security threat by authorities in the Netherlands and the United States.[1] In the masthead of Hack-Tic, Gonggrijp described his role as hoofdverdachte ('prime suspect'). He was convinced that the Internet would radically alter society.[2]
In 1993, a number of people surrounding Hack-Tic including Gonggrijp founded XS4ALL, the first ISP that offered access to the Internet for private individuals in the Netherlands.[citation needed] Gonggrijp sold the company to Dutch-Telecom KPN in 1997.[citation needed] After he left XS4ALL, Gonggrijp founded ITSX, a computer security evaluation company, which was bought by Madison Gurkha in 2006.[citation needed] In 2001, Gonggrijp started work on the Cryptophone, a mobile telephone that can encrypt conversations.[3]
Throughout the years, he has repeatedly shown his concerns about the increasing amount of information on individuals that government agencies and companies have access to.[citation needed] Rop held a talk titled "We lost the war"[4] at the Chaos Communication Congress 2005 in Berlin together with Frank Rieger.[5]
In 2006 he founded the organisation "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting computers") which campaigns against the use of electronic voting systems without a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail and which showed in October 2006 on Dutch television how an electronic voting machine from manufacturer Nedap could easily be hacked.[6] These findings were taken seriously both by the Dutch government and by international election observers.[7]
Gonggrijp has worked for WikiLeaks, helping prepare the Collateral Murder April 2010 release of video footage from a Baghdad airstrike[8][9][10] that killed civilians, including two Reuters journalists.[11]
According to Gonggrijp, the reason is his assistance in enabling WikiLeaks to release the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010, a WikiLeaks action.[13][self-published source]
