Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing – at least sometimes – without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles.
Rebecca MacKinnon
While the Internet can’t be controlled 100 percent, it’s possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.
Rebecca MacKinnon
For centuries, the Yangtze River – the longest in Asia – has played an important role in China’s history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks – upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics – is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: what we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it.
Rebecca MacKinnon
A moral argument about whether censorship is good or bad deteriorates quickly into accusations about who is more or less patriotic, moral, pious, and so on.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Facebook is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its ‘population’ comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people’s online activities and identities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Facebook is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its ‘population’ comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people’s online activities and identities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Whether it’s Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn’t have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Facebook is blocked in mainland China, but is used heavily by the rest of the Chinese-speaking world, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The way I think liberties get eroded is not that all of a sudden you become an Orwellian state, but gradually it becomes harder for people with unpopular views to speak out without being in danger, be it from the state or just from the majority of the people who don’t like them.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Internet freedom is a bit of a Rorschach test: it means different things to different people.
Rebecca MacKinnon
In January 2012, Google Plus started to roll out support for nicknames and pseudonyms, but those registering with a name other than their real-life one must be able to prove that they have been using that alternative name elsewhere, either on the Web or in real life.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Intermediary liability’ means that the intermediary, a service that acts as ‘intermediate’ conduit for the transmission or publication of information, is held liable or legally responsible for everything its users do.
Rebecca MacKinnon
There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Clear limits should be set on how power is exercised in cyberspace by companies as well as governments through the democratic political process and enforced through law.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Internet freedom is not possible without freedom from fear, and users will not be free from fear unless they are sufficiently protected from online theft and attack.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.
Rebecca MacKinnon
When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn’t like.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Human rights in cyberspace are really no different from rights in the physical world.
Rebecca MacKinnon
You don’t have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.
Rebecca MacKinnon
While sanctions against Iran and Syria are intended to constrain those countries’ governments, they have had the unfortunate side effect of constraining activists’ access to free online software and services used widely across the Middle East, including browsers, online chat applications, and online storage services.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Trade shows such as the wire tappers’ ball are highly secretive and ban journalists from attending. None of the U.S. agencies that attended the wire tappers’ ball – including the FBI, the Secret Service, and every branch of the military – were willing to comment when a reporter queried them about their attendance.
Rebecca MacKinnon
It’s harder and harder for journalists to get out in the field and interview Iraqis. The Web can get these voices out easily and cheaply.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The critical question is: How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy?
Rebecca MacKinnon
China’s censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
If China can’t even given LinkedIn enough breathing room to operate in China, that would be a very unfortunate signal for a government to send its professionals about its priorities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Nothing ever goes as planned in China.
Rebecca MacKinnon
If you just technically adhere to the law, sometimes that’s enough, sometimes it’s not; it’s really hard to predict. There is definitely a possibility that the Chinese authorities won’t find it sufficient.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
There’s a real contradiction that’s difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.
Rebecca MacKinnon
To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal.
Rebecca MacKinnon
If they lose their legal basis for owning a .cn domain, google.cn would cease to exist, or if it continued to exist, it would be illegal, and doing anything blatantly illegal in China puts their employees at serious risk.
Rebecca MacKinnon
It’s a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Sohu will protect you from yourself.
Rebecca MacKinnon
The Chinese government clearly sees Internet and mobile innovation as a major driver of its global economic competitiveness going forward.
Rebecca MacKinnon
China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail.
Rebecca MacKinnon
There’s a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.
Rebecca MacKinnon