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Dear colleagues,<br>
Two people from the Internet community left us in the last couple of
days - Özgür Uçkan (54) and Casper Bowden (53). Some of you might
have worked with one or the other. <br>
It is a very sad moment for the European Internet community, and for
those of us, who knew them. <br>
RIP. <br>
<br>
<br>
Global Voices <a
href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/r-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best/">write</a>
about Ozgur:<br>
<div class="post-header"> <a
href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/r-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best/"
rel="bookmark" title="R.I.P. Özgür Uçkan: Netizens of Turkey
Lose One of Their Best"> R.I.P. Özgür Uçkan: Netizens of Turkey
Lose One of Their Best </a> <br>
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<div class="postmeta post-description" id="post-description"> <span
class="post-date">Posted <a
href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/"
title="posts from 2015/07/12">12 July 2015</a> <span
class="post-time">11:47 GMT</span></span> </div>
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<p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-531081"
src="cid:part9.07020606.07080508@veni.com" alt="500"
height="279" width="400"></p>
<p>Dr. Özgür Uçkan, one of Turkey's few leading digital activists
and a co-founder of Alternatif Bilisim, an association working
on digital rights and freedoms in the country, died on July 10,
2015. He was just 54-years-old and had been seriously ill for
some time.</p>
<p>A writer, teacher and advisor, Uçkan dedicated his working life
to discussions of the knowledge economy, creative industries,
information design and management, communication design, art and
culture, while spending much of his time on digital freedom
issues.</p>
<p>Uçkan's<a href="http://www.ozguruckan.com/" target="_blank">
website</a> is mostly in Turkish but there is also some
English language content and his name regularly appears in web
searches as an expert on the state of Internet freedom
in Turkey.</p>
<p>An obituary and more photos of Uçkan can be found <a
href="http://www.ozguruckan.com/kategori/kategorilenmemis/63029/dr.-ozgur-uckan-i-kaybettik..."
target="_blank">here</a>, while many Turkish netizens linked
to other online tributes:
</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-531080"
src="cid:part12.07070205.09020702@veni.com" alt="FireShot
Capture - Ozgur Uckan (@ozuckan) I Twitter -
https___twitter.com_ozuckan" height="187" width="400"><br>
This screen capture from his Twitter profile sums up his twin
interests in theory and the practicalities of online freedom
advocacy.</p>
<p>The cover photo is from the now legendary Internet Freedom
March in Taksim, Istanbul on May 15, 2011.</p>
<p>Dr. Uçkan is one of those seen here holding a banner reading
“Internet without Censorship” in Turkish.</p>
<p>His pinned tweet is a quote from Deleuze and Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus. Prior to the quote he writes “This sums up my
feelings”, while the quote itself reads “The masses were not
deceived, at a particular historical moment they desired
fascism.”</p>
<p>Uçkan was well versed in Deleuzian art theory, which he
combined with his later growing interest in cybercultural
issues.</p>
<p>He will be truly missed.</p>
</div>
<br>
<h1>****</h1>
<br>
<br>
The obituary for Casper was published in the <a
href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/10/caspar-bowden-european-privacy-advocate-dies-at-53/?mod=ST1">Wall
Street Journal</a>: <br>
<br>
<b>Caspar Bowden, European Privacy Advocate, Dies at 53</b><br>
<i>By </i><i><a>Ania Nussbaum</a></i><i> </i>
<p>Caspar Bowden, a leading British privacy advocate most well known
for foreshadowing the revelations made by Edward Snowden, died of
a fast-spreading skin cancer on Thursday in southern France, where
he lived, his wife Sandi announced on Twitter. He was 53.</p>
<p>Bowden was an outspoken figure who worked for <a
href="http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=MSFT">Microsoft</a>
and advised the British government and the European Union. He was
traveling the world to speak about privacy at conferences.</p>
<p>At a hacker festival in France in May 2013, Bowden warned that
European phone calls, emails and any kind of data could be watched
by U.S. authorities without a warrant. A few weeks later, former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the existence of a massive
surveillance program.</p>
<p>“The Snowden revelation was a moment of victory for Caspar,” his
friend and privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian said. “People
who had thought he was crazy were proved wrong.”</p>
<p>As the EU European Parliament is about to review new rules to
protect data proposed by the EU members states, Bowden leaves an
uncompleted legacy: After the Snowden revelation, Bowden became an
adviser to the European parliament on data privacy issues. In
2013, he wrote in a report for the deputies that concluded the
only way for the EU to protect its citizens’ privacy was to change
U.S. law.</p>
<p>“He was a strong supporter for an EU-wide standard for data
protection,” said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European
parliament and its rapporteur for the data protection regulation.</p>
<p>Ever since his youth, Bowden had always been interested in
technology. At 14, he built his own 16-bit computer. In Magdalene
College Cambridge, Bowden studied math. After a few years of
self-employment as an “inventor,” he co-founded the Foundation for
Information Policy Research, a British think tank for Internet
policy, at age of 26, his brother Simon Bowden said in a phone
interview. In his late twenties, he was hired by Goldman Sachs as
a mathematician, Simon said.</p>
<p>As he was working at Goldman Sachs, Bowden became an adviser for
the Labour Scientist society, an organization affiliated with the
Labour party. He convinced the party that personal data protection
was a major issue, but left disappointed after it won the general
elections in 1997 and became a key opponent to the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act, a law that laid out the framework for
surveillance in the U.K. in 2000.</p>
<p>In 2002, the activist became in charge of privacy issues at
Microsoft worldwide. “They hired him because they wanted to show
that they were concerned by privacy,” his brother Simon said.</p>
<p>Caspar Bowden used to say that he joined the company as a “chief
privacy officer” and decided to change his role to “chief privacy
adviser” so that he would not be accountable for what was
happening in the company, according to William Heath, an
entrepreneur whom Bowden inspired to become a privacy activist.</p>
<p>His experience at Microsoft gave him an insider view on the
cooperation between U.S. intelligence and U.S. large corporations
that were providing the public agencies access to personal data,
said Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of European digital-rights
group La Quadrature du Net, who visited him at the hospital.</p>
<p>“[I] put my job on the line about seven times in nine years in
defense of European privacy when I was at Microsoft,” Bowden once
wrote in an email to his friend Gus Hosein, director of the
U.K.-based organization Privacy International. Bowden was fired
from Microsoft in 2011. His brother said he was asked to leave
because his views diverged from Microsoft’s.</p>
<p>Since then, he had struggled to make a living of his expertise by
giving conferences about private data protection all over the
world. “My brother was in great financial distress at the end of
his life because he was fighting for his ideas,” Simon Bowden
said. Caspar Bowden was on the board of Tor Project, a service
that allows anyone to browse the Web anonymously.</p>
<p>“We have lost one of our key anchors: He would identify the
conspiracy, guess the game, and hold what was first seen as
uncompromising positions until we realized why,” said Gus Hosein.</p>
<p>Diagnosed with melanoma a few months ago, Bowden was still
meeting with data protection activists on his death bed.</p>
<p>“He was passionate — the kind of passion where you don’t care
about yourself,” said Marc Bruyère, one of Bowden’s friends and
the organizer of the hacker festival in the south of France, an
hour away by car from the former mill he used to live in. “You
only care about saving the world.”</p>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Best,
Veni Markovski
Internet Society - Bulgaria
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.isoc.bg">www.isoc.bg</a>
</pre>
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