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

[Mark Urban]

A terrible loss. And, as Vint says, too young.

 

Mark D. Urban

Vice Chair,

ISOC Global Chapter on Disabilities and Special Needs

 

From: Chapter-delegates [mailto:chapter-delegates-bounces at elists.isoc.org] On Behalf Of Veni Markovski
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2015 6:33 AM
To: internetpolicy at elists.isoc.org; Chapter Delegates
Cc: European Chapters
Subject: [Chapter-delegates] Sad news from Turkey and the UK - two of our colleagues have passed away in the last few days

 

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 



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: 


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 - Bulgaria
www.isoc.bg <http://www.isoc.bg> 
 
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