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

[Christian de Larrinaga]

We can ill afford to lose such talented Internauts and sincere moral
forces.

I participated some years ago alongside Caspar on several privacy
enhancing activities in UK and European Internet communities. He would
lead from the front often at his own personal cost. Behind the scenes I
tried to what I could to encourage guidance and support for responses he
led on legislative initiatives from the end of the 90s, notably RIPA
2000. An Act that he identified early on as having big problems. A fact
that has been officially confirmed this year in the Anderson report
amongst others. His prescience was shown to be just as accurate more
recently in analysing the the total absence of legal protections for non
US residents from US legislation. An analysis that put the consequences
of the later Snowden revelations into stark perspective.

I learned a huge amount from him. He not only captured the "brief" he
could pre-empt it and own it. Caspar was a one man Privacy working
group. When he turned up to a meeting it put everybody on alert to be
"better".

Despite his selfless dedication to defending all of our personal space
in the digital era the job is far from done. Indeed this year may yet be
the start of a most troubling and difficult period since the end of the
90s as weakening encryption is again being put at the top of the
political agenda.

Caspar leaves a large hole. Those who remain have a significant
challenge to step up to the plate let alone fill his shoes.


Christian


Veni Markovski 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
> <http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fglobalvoicesonline.org%2F2015%2F07%2F12%2Fr-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best%2F&text=R.I.P.+%C3%96zg%C3%BCr+U%C3%A7kan%3A+Netizens+of+Turkey+Lose+One+of+Their+Best&via=sakaerka><http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fglobalvoicesonline.org%2F2015%2F07%2F12%2Fr-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best%2F><http://reddit.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fglobalvoicesonline.org%2F2015%2F07%2F12%2Fr-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best%2F&title=R.I.P.+%C3%96zg%C3%BCr+U%C3%A7kan%3A+Netizens+of+Turkey+Lose+One+of+Their+Best+%7C+Global+Voices><https://plus.google.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fglobalvoicesonline.org%2F2015%2F07%2F12%2Fr-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best%2F>
> <http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/07/12/r-i-p-ozgur-uckan-netizens-of-turkey-lose-one-of-their-best/print/>
> 
> 
> 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'swebsite <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:
> 
> 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 - Bulgaria
> www.isoc.bg
> 
> _______________________________________________
> To manage your ISOC subscriptions or unsubscribe,
> please log into the ISOC Member Portal:
> https://portal.isoc.org/
> Then choose Interests & Subscriptions from the My Account menu.

-- 
Christian de Larrinaga  FBCS, CITP,
-------------------------
@ FirstHand
-------------------------
+44 7989 386778
cdel at firsthand.net
-------------------------