Bravo Caspar Bowden.

I want to pay tribute to a friend who influenced me. Caspar Bowden was best known as a privacy campaigner (I hope you’ll read the links below) and he spent the last two years on fire, after seeing all his concerns vindicated in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

We worked in different technical fields, but with similar problems and power dynamics. Conversations with Caspar would run to three in the morning. He was persistent with details, and would never let anything drop without it being fully understood.

This made him effective. Where others would have been slowed down by false reassurance, or given up in the face of intimidating detail, Caspar would read the legislation, read the code, understand the context, and keep going until he had a way forward. Once the analysis was clear, and the solution formulated, he would set about communicating it, with the same dogged enthusiasm.

I think this led to a naive but highly infectious pair of assumptions: everybody will want to understand important problems; and everybody will want to fix them. As emotional and intellectual positions, these are worth a shot. Most campaigners are defeated, not by absolute power, but by apathy and obfuscation. Caspar was eager and primed to sweep both of those barriers away. He was ten years older than me, and when I was in my twenties, hanging out with Caspar, he was founding FIPR. Caspar made campaigning on technical issues look normal, and I am very glad to have known him.

The basic instructions for life outside the home don’t change, but they bear repeating: if you see something fun and interesting, you should do it now; if you see something important that you don’t understand, you should try to learn more about it now; if you see something that’s wrong, you should try to fix it now.

Bravo Caspar.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/09/caspar-bowden-pro-privacy-campaigner-dies-of-cancer/

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/libe/dv/briefingnote_/briefingnote_en.pdf

http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2015/07/goodbye-caspar.html

http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/feature/2417143/obituary-caspar-bowden-privacy-campaigner

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/microsoft-privacy-chief-nsa