Very saddened to see that Caspar Bowden, first director of FIPR, and tireless digital rights campaigner has passed away. Fine obituary from Ross Anderson in EDRi-Gram:
https://edri.org/remembering-caspar-bowden/
Caspar moved to Microsoft in 2002 and worked for them for nine years as their Chief Privacy Adviser for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. What that actually entailed he described in a talk at the The 31st Chaos Communication Congress (31C3) that is linked at the bottom of this article; he was responsible for briefing and coordinating some of the activities of about forty executives, each of which managed the company’s relationships with some particular country. He pointed out to them that the The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s (FISA Court’s) powers meant that governments entrusting their data to US clouds were giving unfettered access to the US intelligence services. He was subsequently fired.
For the last four years of his life he was a strong critic of US surveillance and the failure of European institutions to do anything effective about it. He was a gifted communicator who could explain complex technical issues around wiretaps, surveillance and cryptography to policy and lay audiences.