[Chapter-delegates] Sad news from Turkey and the UK - two of our colleagues have passed away in the last few days

Mon Jul 13 04:21:45 PDT 2015

Too young... :-(
On Jul 13, 2015 06:33, "Veni Markovski" <veni at veni.com> wrote:

>  Dear colleagues,
> 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.
> It is a very sad moment for the European Internet community, and for those
> of us, who knew them.
> RIP.
>
>
> Global Voices write
> <http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/r-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best/>
> about Ozgur:
>  R.I.P. Özgür Uçkan: Netizens of Turkey Lose One of Their Best
> <http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/r-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best/>
>  Posted 12 July 2015 <http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/> 11:47 GMT
>
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>
> [image: 500]
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Uçkan's website <http://www.ozguruckan.com/> 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.
>
> An obituary and more photos of Uçkan can be found here
> <http://www.ozguruckan.com/kategori/kategorilenmemis/63029/dr.-ozgur-uckan-i-kaybettik...>,
> while many Turkish netizens linked to other online tributes:
>
> [image: FireShot Capture - Ozgur Uckan (@ozuckan) I Twitter -
> https___twitter.com_ozuckan]
> This screen capture from his Twitter profile sums up his twin interests in
> theory and the practicalities of online freedom advocacy.
>
> The cover photo is from the now legendary Internet Freedom March in
> Taksim, Istanbul on May 15, 2011.
>
> Dr. Uçkan is one of those seen here holding a banner reading “Internet
> without Censorship” in Turkish.
>
> 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.”
>
> Uçkan was well versed in Deleuzian art theory, which he combined with his
> later growing interest in cybercultural issues.
>
> He will be truly missed.
>
> ****
>
> The obituary for Casper was published in the Wall Street Journal
> <http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/10/caspar-bowden-european-privacy-advocate-dies-at-53/?mod=ST1>:
>
>
> *Caspar Bowden, European Privacy Advocate, Dies at 53*
> *By **Ania Nussbaum*
>
> 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.
>
> Bowden was an outspoken figure who worked for Microsoft
> <http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=MSFT> and
> advised the British government and the European Union. He was traveling the
> world to speak about privacy at conferences.
>
> 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.
>
> “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.”
>
> 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.
>
> “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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> “[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.
>
> 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.
>
> “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.
>
> Diagnosed with melanoma a few months ago, Bowden was still meeting with
> data protection activists on his death bed.
>
> “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.”
>
>
> --
>
> Best,
> Veni Markovski
> Internet Society - Bulgariawww.isoc.bg
>
>
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