The older generation still remembers Germany's legendary Chaos Computer Club, (CCC) which rose to fame during the Cold War—a time when people considered building bunkers instead of garden ponds, students were required to read Die Wolke (“Fall-Out”), and films like WarGames with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy fueled fears of hackers’ seemingly limitless power. The CCC, known for its programmers working under code names, carried out high-profile hacks, including those targeting NASA and the KGB. By the late 1980s, however, the hacker collective had largely gone quiet—until the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3), held December 27–30 in Hamburg, brought them back with a bang.

A hacker using the pseudonym Martha Root, scheduled to give only a short talk titled “The Heartbreak Machine: Nazis in the Echo Chamber,” took the stage dressed as a Pink Power Ranger—and, almost as an afterthought, deleted the servers and backups of WhiteDate, a site described as a “Tinder for Nazis,” entirely live during her presentation. While at it, she continued wiping out WhiteChild, a service connecting white sperm and egg donors, and WhiteDeal, a blatantly racist marketplace for freelance labor.

Even more remarkable, Root had spent months beforehand training an AI chatbot to interact with WhiteDate users, gathering as much information as possible before she deleted the site —a refreshingly productive use of AI technology. The chatbot followed simple instructions well suited for the target audience on both sides of the North Atlantic:

Obtaining the list of WhiteDate users was child’s play. “The worst security you could imagine,” Root said wryly. She has since created a public interface on okstupid.lol, allowing anyone to browse the profiles of the users. An interactive map shows the geolocation of identified users, extracted from image metadata shared on WhiteDate.

Shockingly, 86 percent of the site’s more than 6,500 users were men—a “gender ratio that makes Smurf Village look like a feminist utopia,” Root dryly observed. The data has since been handed over to the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which has compiled the files under the release titled WhiteLeaks.

“At the request of the source, access to data not published on okstupid.lol is currently restricted to verified journalists and researchers,” notes the nonprofit’s website.

In short, this is a remarkable example of how AI can be used to disrupt hate groups at scale. The hack “demonstrates how algorithms, AI personas, and investigative thinking can expose hate, challenge its narratives, and break down echo chambers,” according to an official summary.