[Chapter-delegates] Sad news from Turkey and the UK - two of our colleagues have passed away in the last few days
George Fong
george at lateralplains.com
Mon Jul 13 06:09:43 PDT 2015
Our thoughts and condolences to their loved ones and the Chapter
families around them.
Cheers
George
--
George Fong
President
Internet Australia
phone:0353177123
int phone: +61353177123
mobile: 0438887488
int mobile: +61 438887488
president at internet.org.au
www.internet.org.au
On Mon, 2015-07-13 at 07:21 -0400, Vint Cerf wrote:
> 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 about Ozgur:
>
> R.I.P. Özgür Uçkan: Netizens of Turkey Lose One of Their Best
>
> Posted 12 July 2015 11:47 GMT
>
> 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 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, while
> many Turkish netizens linked to other online tributes:
>
> 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:
>
> 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 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
>
>
>
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