Caspar Bowden spent nearly a decade working for Microsoft, where he held the position of chief privacy adviser. He says he knew nothing of the PRISM data sharing scheme while there, a fact that’s turned him into a code-examining member of the paranoid elite.
Bowden claims to have lost all trust for Microsoft in the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal, adding that he only uses open-source software himself these days — and likes to examine the code before doing so. He’s gone just a little bit mad.
Speaking at a security conference in Switzerland, Bowden warned that global democracy is under threat amid the surveillance fallout, saying: “The public now has to think about the fact that anybody in public life, or person in a position of influence in government, business or bureaucracy, now is thinking about what the NSA knows about them. So how can we trust that the decisions that they make are objective and that they aren’t changing the decisions that they make to protect their career?” [Guardian]