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
One day, people in China may be able to see the records of conversations between multinational tech companies and the Chinese authorities.
Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.
Defending a free and open global Internet requires a broad-based global movement with the stamina to engage in endless - and often highly technical - national and international policy battles.
Companies have choices to make about what extent they're handling their users' content.
Companies should have a due diligence process to determine the likelihood that their technologies will be used to carry out human rights abuses before doing business with a particular country or distributor.
Normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, combined with economic reforms and opening, transformed the Chinese people's lives.
After Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010 that Internet freedom would be a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, the State Department decided to take what Clinton calls a 'venture capital' approach to the funding of tools, research, public information projects, and training.
The Olympics brought a lot of development to Beijing, but I don't see that there have been any changes to human rights as a result of the Olympics.
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.
It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.
Research In Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, has been asked by a range of governments to comply with surveillance requirements.
President Barack Obama's administration sometimes finds itself at odds with members of Congress who oppose nearly everything the United Nations does on principle.
I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market - which is a big enough challenge even for the established players - that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture.