QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Caspar Bowden, Independent Privacy Researcher

Caspar Bowden

Biography: Caspar Bowden

Caspar Bowden is an independent advocate for information privacy rights, and public understanding of privacy research in computer science. He is a specialist in EU Data Protection, European and US surveillance law, PET research, identity management, and information ethics. He is author of 2013 EU Parliament inquiry briefing on the US FISA law, and co-authored the 2012 Note on privacy and Cloud computing (which anticipated the infringements to EU data sovereignty disclosed by Edward Snowden). For nine years he was Chief Privacy Adviser for Microsoft for forty countries, and previously co-founded and was first director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research. He was an expert adviser for UK Parliamentary legislation, and co-organized six public conferences on encryption, data retention, and interception policy. He has previous careers in financial engineering and risk management, and software engineering (systems, 3D games, applied cryptography), including work with Goldman Sachs, Microsoft Consulting Services, Acorn, Research Machines, and IBM. He founded the Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, is a fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the advisory bodies of several civil society associations.

Twitter: @CasparBowden

Presentation: Reflections on Mistrusting Trust: how Policy & Technical People use the T-word in Opposite Senses

Track: Privacy & Security - Rebuilding Trust / Time: Wednesday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Elizabeth Windsor

Since well before the crypto wars of the 1990s, the worlds of policy and technical security have invoked the word "trust" with meanings that are in actuality polar opposites, and usually (but not always) without realizing they are doing so. This talk will exhume some forgotten lessons in duplicity, and argue that the last thing we should try to do is rebuild "trust" in one of these senses, and doing so in the other of these senses is not going to be very easy (after the irreversible changes in public perceptions brought about by Edward Snowden). Along the way, we will explain what happened after the crypto wars and how we arrived in a very bad place for public policy and democracy, and what we can try to do about it now.