[9] Having predicted US mass surveillance programmes such as PRISM from open sources, he gathered renewed attention after the Snowden leaks vindicated his warnings.
[3] In 1997, he entered the world of privacy advocacy when he attended the first Scrambling for Safety event,[11] in response to the UK government's plans for key-escrow encryption,[12] organised by Simon Davies at the London School of Economics.
[13] After the Labour won power in 1997 and reneged on its promises, considering instead to enforce mandatory cryptographic backdoors, Bowden co-founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) in May 1998.
[16][24] In 2013, Bowden authored the 2013 European Parliament inquiry briefing on the US FISA law, The US surveillance programmes and their impact on EU citizens' fundamental rights,[25][7][5] In an interview to The Guardian,[26] he stated that he did not trust Microsoft.
[29] In winter 2014, he gave a talk on the subject at the 31st Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, The Cloud Conspiracy, detailing how he had worked out the shape of PRISM from open sources, and the lack of reaction to his warnings to European Union institutions.
He was prepared to wrestle with the user unfriendly inconveniences of privacy enhancing technologies, as the almost meltdown of his laptop, four minutes into his 'Reflections on Mistrusting Trust' talk at QCon last summer, demonstrated."
He foresaw Tempora, Prism....I'm gutted we will be without him in the coming debates over the Investigatory Powers Bill...He would have been the intellectual powerhouse and a forceful critic of all who fell short in the defense of privacy."
It was spring 2011, and he had just shot a bolt of electricity through a dusty seminar on online privacy with a passionate invective on sham anonymization of datasets that went into idiocy-explainer levels of detail about how current U.K. data protection law was being a complete ass."
He went to Microsoft for a while to be their main privacy advocate, beat his brains out on that gig, walked out with his head held high, and went back to shit-disturbing for activist groups."
- Joanna Rutkowska[44]"Very few people I know can combine a rigorous grasp of first principles and unswerving moral sense with the ruthless attention to detail and relentless practicality required to do something about them all.
Like me, Caspar was more interested in fighting the issues than who he might upset along the way - it made him a controversial figure but his intelligence, commitment and knowledge were without question."
- Alexander Hanff, CEO, Think Privacy[46][47]"Yes, he could be abrupt, and yes, he often 'bent' convention by asking direct and probing questions in ways that risked alienating the policymakers he sought to influence.