Caspar Bowden sprang into my life so fully formed as a privacy advocate that I was startled to discover he was not ever thus. I was astonished and flattered when, years after we first met, he told me that one of the things that led him into the politics of cryptography was articles I had written in the early 1990s.
He fought against demands that individuals should be required to store copies of their cryptographic keys with government, spotted the “snooper’s charter” when it was still just a wish-list item, and issued very early warnings about the dangers of the rampant collection of metadata and the risks that provisions in US laws like the Fisa amendments and Patriot Act posed even to data stored outside its borders. Latterly, he was particularly incensed about American exceptionalism, which reserves human rights for Americans and refuses to award them to foreigners.
He was, you could say, advocacy all the way down. At a party he gave in 1999, I recall the two of us getting animatedly stuck into some of these subjects somewhere around 2am. Feeling left out, “I came for the craic,” the person sitting next to him drunkenly protested. “You don’t understand,” he replied. “For us, this is the craic.”
