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

[borka at e5.ijs.si]

Yes, it is sad for these people who were young
and active in the ISOC mission implementation.

Borka


On Mon, 13 Jul 2015, Mark Urban wrote:

> 
> 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 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
> 
>  
> 
>