Image: Rama, CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons
It was with great sadness that we heard of the death last week of Caspar Bowden, privacy activist.
Caspar had a long history of privacy advocacy, and was particularly notable in both the fight for public access to strong cryptography in the 1990s and the current fight against mass surveillance. He was co-founder and director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research (a UK-based privacy think tank), former Chief Privacy Adviser for Microsoft, a director for the Tor Project, and a member of the Advisory Council of the UK-based Open Rights Group (a digital rights lobby group like EFA).
We had only a few interactions with Caspar, but found him always smart, knowledgable, passionate and uncompromising in his support for the universal right to privacy. The world of privacy advocacy is a fairly small one, and it has lost a lion.
Today, we heard of the establishment of the Caspar Bowden Legacy Fund to continue some of his work in privacy advocacy. It will not replace him, but continuing the fight for a universal right to privacy will be an appropriate way to honour his memory.
Thank you Caspar, we owe you a great deal.