Caspar Bowden obituary

Anti-surveillance campaigner and former Microsoft privacy chief who warned of online state snooping many years before Edward Snowden

Caspar Bowden, who has died of cancer aged 53, warned of online state snooping many years before Edward Snowden, and ran a successful campaign to stop surveillance laws becoming even worse than they are. He entered the fray in 1997, when Tony Blair went back on a pre-election promise not to demand government access to cryptographic keys. At a Scrambling for Safety conference convened at the London School of Economics to thrash out a response, Caspar emerged as knowledgable, articulate and passionate.

He was born in London, the only child of Kenneth and Angela Bowden, though he had two older half-brothers, Malcolm and Simon. He attended Westminster school and read mathematics at Magdalene College, Cambridge, but spent a lot of time working on artificial intelligence and failed his degree. He found a job as a programmer at Island Logic, then moved to Goldman Sachs, working on projects including option pricing and cryptographic software. He became an active member of the Labour party in Islington, and by 1997 was chair of Scientists for Labour.

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