The world's oldest and largest global hacker organization The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has announced it will open next week's conference, the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (30c3), with a December 27 opening keynote by Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn Greenwald's keynote tops our list of must-see talks at the legendary event. 30C3's schedule shows that the compelling keynote won't be the only explosive presentation at 30C3.

Mr. Greenwald's keynote will be webcast live on this page. If you miss it, all of 30C3's talks will be archived on the offical CCC media website. CCC's archives go online astonishingly fast.

30C3 is the 30th Chaos Communication Congress, brought to us by the Chaos Computer Club. The conference and all of its hands-on events run from December 27th to 30th, 2013 at the CCH Congress Center in Hamburg, Germany.

The conference program boasts over 130 talks from a diverse range of the world's top hackers in five tracks: Hardware and Making, Art and Beauty, Science and Engineering, Security, Safety and Politics, and Ethics and Society.

CCC explains, "The lecture programme will be augmented by numerous workshops and offerings for young hackers."

Competition to speak at this year's Congress was serious. In its blog post announcing the keynote, CCC explained that the talk lineup was whittled down from more than 360 submissions by teams of experts specific to each subject.

If you're interested, follow CCC on Twitter or the Twitter list of 30c3 speakers. Here's the index for the entire 30C3 talk shedule.

Day 1, select highlights

On the evening of December 27th, the 30C3 keynote will be delivered by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whose work this year with the Snowden documents has changed the world's understanding of surveillance, security and the actions of the United States in spying and surveillance matters worldwide.

More interesting December 27 talks: Dispatches from Fort Meade (reporting on the secret trial of Chelsea Manning), Electronic Bank Robberies (stealing money from ATMs with malware), Hardening hardware and choosing a #goodBIOS (rejecting persistence of malicious software and tripping up the evil maid).

See also: Complete Day 1 schedule

Day 2, select highlights

December 28: SCADA StrangeLove 2, [Google] Glass Hacks,, Hardware Attacks, Advanced ARM Exploitation, and Android Hacking, Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit (repurposing an Inmarsat Dish with Travis Goodspeed), Extracting keys from FPGAs, OTP Tokens and Door Locks (side-channel and other attacks in practice), Disclosure DOs and DONT's from the EFF, and Jahresrückblick des CCC (the annual review of the CCC).

See also: Complete Day 2 schedule

Day 3, select highlights

December 29: CounterStrike (implementation of lawful interception), RFID Treehouse of Horror (hacking city-wide access control systems), Even More Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation, Europe, the USA and Identity Ecosystems, ID Cards in China: Your Worst Nightmare, The Exploration and Exploitation of an SD Memory Card ("This talk demonstrates a method for reverse engineering and loading code into the microcontroller within a SD memory card"), Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware.

See also: Complete Day 3 schedule

Day 4, select highlights

December 30: To Protect And Infect (targeted and untargeted surveillance research by Claudio Guarnieri and Morgan Marquis-Boire), Thwarting Evil Maid Attacks (physically unclonable functions for hardware tamper detection), Attacking HomeMatic (live hacking), Through a PRISM, Darkly (everything we know about NSA spying with the EFF), and the CCC Closing Event.

See also: Complete Day 4 schedule

Ongoing:

Lightning Talks, December 28-30 - short lectures any congress participant can present (though the slots are filling up fast).

Self-organized hands-on workshops, meetups and more, all four days. Includes everything! Soldering for Kids, the 30c3 queer meetup, SCADA pentesting workshops, Hammer and Tongs, copyright debates, digital cooking, cocktails, geeks and BDSM meetup, a workshop on Amending the European Parliament draft report on mass surveillance, board game geek meetup, NymRights, Publeaks.nl meetup, knitting, tea, whistleblowing, Chaoswelle Ham Radio Operators, Arduino hacking all day every day, Chaos VPN, Debugging Your Depression, and much more.

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30C3 is a noncommercial event with a low entrance fee, and is made possible thanks to an army of CCC volunteers (even ones that hack Apple's Touch ID). According to CCC, 30C3's internet connectivity will be a record-breaking 100GB link made possible by donations from ISPs and network equipment vendors.

We can't wait. ZDNet will be attending talks and reporting events live from Hamburg as they happen.