Rebecca MacKinnon
Rebecca MacKinnon
Rebecca MacKinnonis an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative and is currently director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth16 September 1969
CountryUnited States of America
The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.
The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.
It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.
While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.
Over time, if you want rights, you have to also show that you can use them responsibly and that you can build a positive world in the online space, and that's also very important.
Over the past several decades, a growing number of investors have been choosing to put their money in funds that screen companies for their environmental and labor records. Some socially responsible investors are starting to add free expression and privacy to their list of criteria.
Research In Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, has been asked by a range of governments to comply with surveillance requirements.
It becomes dangerous for somebody who doesn't want their boss to know their sexual preference to use online networks to push for laws supporting gay marriage or same-sex partner rights if they can't do so with a pseudonym.
Microsoft runs the world's biggest blogging platform, MSN Spaces.
WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.
Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.
I think one of the problems I think with a lot of people in high school is that people don't think of the Internet as a real place or a place that has physical consequences in the physical world. This happens with adults who ought to know better, too.
Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid.
We must all rise to the challenge to demonstrate that security and prosperity in the Internet age are not only compatible with liberty, they ultimately depend on it.