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
Rebecca MacKinnon quotes about
As a citizen of a community, if you never vote or engage, don't be surprised when the outcome doesn't serve your interests; you've never done anything to push things in the right direction.
Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.
The Internet is empowering everybody. It's empowering Democrats. It's empowering dictators. It's empowering criminals. It's empowering people who are doing really wonderful and creative things.
It took a generation for companies to recognise their responsibilities in terms of labour practices and another generation for them to recognise their environmental obligations.
It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan.
The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.
The user in China wants the same thing that any Internet user wants - privacy in conversations, maximum access to information, and the ability to speak their minds online.
What role did the Internet play in the Egyptian Revolution? People will be arguing about the answer to that question for decades if not centuries.
While the Internet can't be controlled 100 percent, it's possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.
While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications.
We like to think of the Internet as a border-busting technology.
Bottom line is, it's good they're in China. . . . But there's a lot more they can do when it comes to thinking through the human rights implications of their business practices. If high-tech companies are serious about doing the right thing, they can join together and lobby for more transparency and accountability in the way in which Chinese officialdom deals with Internet services.
Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.
Digital power is every bit as likely to be abused as physical power, but is often more insidious because it is often wielded in the background until its results manifest themselves in the offline world.