A year ago Arjen Kamphuis went missing in northern Norway. Given Arjen’s personal and professional history, various scenarios were all possible to his friends and family. As time went on without news, the question whatever happened morphed into dealing with the ever diminishing probability of his return.
When his belongings were found near and in the water shortly after he went missing, an accident seemed a logical conclusion, but then his phone was activated in the south of Norway. In the past year this has led to various conspiracy theories, who when rebuffed by Arjan’s family and friends, were extended to include them.
Norwegian police have now released a statement they consider his disappearance as a closed case (a machine translation of a Norwegian news article). They now announced that his phone and other belongings such as his laptop, were found and taken by two truck drivers who had been fishing near the spot Arjen went missing. The truck drivers are cleared from any suspicion, and a kajaking accident is the most likely explanation.
I’m sure the CTs will continue on (‘Why were the truck drivers never mentioned before? They were Eastern European, so likely Russian operatives!’). I do hope, even in the absence of absolute certainty, his family and friends can have some peace of mind over what happened.
I’ve know Arjen for a long time, and in our infrequent but regular interactions it was great to get a taste of his brilliant and active mind. Since his disappearance I’ve more actively taken up the topic of information security, paying what I learned from Arjen forward to those around me. There’s never much to learn from random tragedy itself, except what Arjen’s close friend Ancilla wrote late last year, to truly care and be curious about how those around you are doing, and to keep them close, to spend time with them.
As I said earlier, in relation to Elmine and I spending the effort to go to Canada for a few days of conversation and hanging out
The simple act of spending time together talking about life for a while [as Peter described it] is a rather rich and powerful thing to do, which packs the full complexity of being human.
In conversation with Arjen during a roof top lunch 11 years ago. The oldest photo I can find of our conversations.
Of course the CTs around Arjen Kamphuis missing continue, here’s an example within hours of Norwegian police coming out with their statement.
Not linking to it, and removed the info about the Twitter account. No use in spreading it, other than holding it up as an example.
Making an unconscious assumption (in this case the assumption that the time of announcing new info is the time that information was gained or determined accurate), and then jumping to conclusions based on that assumption.
Today 17 years ago, at 14:07, I published my first blog post, and some 2000 followed since then. Previously I kept a website that archive.org traces back to early 1998, which was the second incarnation of a static website from 1997 (Demon Internet, my first ISP other than my university, entered the Dutch market in November 1996, and I became their customer at the earliest opportunity. From the start they gave their customers a fixed IP address, allowing me to run my own server, next to the virtual server space they provided with a whopping 5MB of storage .) Maintaining a web presence for over 22 years is I think the longest continuous thing I’ve done during my life.
Last year I suggested to myself on my 16th bloggiversary to use this date yearly to reflect:
In the past 12 months I’ve certainly started to evangelise technology more again. ‘Again’ as I did that in the ’00s as well when I was promoting the use of social software (before it’s transformation into, todays mostly toxic, social media), for informal learning networks, knowledge management and professional development. My manifesto on Networked Agency from 2016, as presented at last year’s State of the Net, is the basis for that renewed effort. It’s not a promotion of tech for tech’s sake, as networked agency comes part and parcel with ethics by design, a perception of digital transformation as distributed digital transformation, and attention in general for how our digital tools are a reflection and extension of our human networks and human nature (when ‘smaller‘ and optionally networked for richer results).
Looking back 12 months I think I’ve succeeded in doing a few things on the level of my own behaviour, my company, my clients, and general communities and society. It’s all early beginnings, but a consistent effort of small things builds up over time steadily I suppose.
On a personal level I kept up the pace of my return to more intensive blogging two years ago, and did more to make my blog not only the nexus but also the starting point for most of my online material. (E.g. I now mostly send out Tweets and Toots from my blog directly). I also am slowly re-adopting and rebuilding my information strategies of old. More importantly I’m practicing more show and tell, of how I work with information. At the Crafting {a} Life unconference that Peter organised on Prince Edward Island in June I participated in three conversations on blogging that way. Peter’s obligation to explain is good guidance in general here.
For my company it means we’ve embarked on a path to more information security awareness, starting with information hygiene mostly. This includes avoiding silos where possible, and beginning the move to a self-hosted Slack-like environment and our own cloud. This is a reflection of my own path in this field since the spring of 2014, then inspired by Brenno de Winter and Arjen Kamphuis, whose disappearance a year ago made me more strongly realise the importance of paying lessons learned forward.
With clients I’ve put the ethics of working with data front and center, which includes earlier topics like privacy law, data sovereignty and procurement, but also builds on my company’s principle of always ensuring the involvement of all external stakeholders when it comes to figuring out the use and value of open government and open data. Some of that is awareness raising, some of that is ensuring small practical steps are taken. Our company is now building up a ‘holistic’ data governance program for clients that includes all this, not just the technical side of data governance.
On the community side several things I got myself involved in are tied to this.
As a board member of Open Nederland I help spread the word about how to allow others to make use of your work with Creative Commons licenses, such as at the recent Open Access Week organised by the Leeuwarden library. Agency and making, and especially the joy of finding (networked) agency through making, made possible by considered sharing, was also my message at the CoderDojo Conference Netherlands last weekend.
Here in the Netherlands I co-hosted two IndieWebCamps in Utrecht in April, and in Amsterdam in September (triggered by a visit to an IndieWebCamp in Germany a year ago). With my co-organiser Frank we’ve also launched a Meet-up around IndieWeb in the hope of more continuously engaging a more local group of participants.
I’ve also contributed to the Copenhagen 150 this year at Techfestival, which resulted in the TechPledge. Specifically I worked to get some version of being responsible for creating ongoing public debate around any tech you create in there, to make reflection integral to tech development. I took the TechPledge, and I ask you to do the same.
Another take-away from my participation in the Copenhagen 150, is to treat my involvement in the use and development of technology more deliberately as a political act in its own right. This allows me to feel a deeper connection I think between tech as extension of human reach and global topics that require a sense of urgency of humanity.
Here’s to another year of blogging, and, more importantly, reading your blog!
Much of the work and thinking around improving my and my company’s overall information hygiene was triggered by conversations I had with Arjen Kamphuis, finally prompting me into action early 2014. He disappeared during vacationing in Norway in August 2018. Later this week an art exhibition about him will open, as well as a book launched bundling his key writings on a.o. information security. I hope to be able to pick the book up and visit the exhibit coming Friday.
Arjen painted by Jillis Groen, after a photo of Arjen at TEDxDelft 2018 I think.
Friday evening I went to the Vrijland estate near Schaarsbergen/Arnhem. This former hq of the Dutch 11th Air Mobile Brigade (who still reside nearby) is currently used by the Hack42 collective. Here the book launch of “Infosecurity (Gran knows why)” and opening of the art exhibition “Into Nothingness” took place, in the former chapel of the estate.
Arjen Kamphuis was well known for his work on government transparency, and especially IT and online security. He e.g trained journalists on how to do their work more safely, and consulted various companies on their IT security. He also e.g. consulted the Dutch government in 2013 on why using voting computers is bad practice in an accountable democracy. Next to that he was an avid hiker and mountaineer. In August 2018, during a trip in the north of Norway he went missing, and is presumed to have died due to a kajaking accident. I’ve known Arjen through his work for well over a decade (and I’ve written about his disappearance here before). I’m sad about his disappearance, and as a result have been more active in paying what I learned from him and what he made me aware of forward since then.
Friends of Arjen have collected a selection of his writings and talks, as well as the text of his 2014 book “Information Security for Journalists” (2017 Dutch translation) that he wrote together with journalist Silkie Carlo. Friday they launched a printed version of that collection with the title “Infosecurity (Gran knows why)“. The subtitle is a reference to Arjen’s grandmother who, having witnessed WWII is said to have inspired him in his government accountability work, and in being alert to surveillance overreach like we are experiencing now in this digital age.
The launch saw some short speeches by friends and colleagues, and the chapel setting in part made it feel like for some it was also a way to say goodbye, a way to organise some sort of closure. Next to the book launch, it was also the opening of the exhibition “Into Nothingness” with paintings by Jillis Groen. Scenes from Norway’s nature and Arjen’s disappearing form.
Audience listening to Helma de Boer presenting the book