Quotes from Rebecca MacKinnon

There are many cases of activists having their Facebook pages and accounts deactivated at critical times, when they are right in the middle of a campaign or organising a demonstration.

I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.

QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.

Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their 'patriotism.'

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.

In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt - something that also happened in Xinjiang - I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.

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.

Human rights in cyberspace are really no different from rights in the physical world.

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.

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.

Internet companies created the social-media tools that fueled the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street insurgencies, and that have helped political candidates rally grass-roots support.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

I do not know of a Chinese blogger who has gone to jail, but I know several who have had their blogs shut down. I also know some Chinese bloggers who have received threatening phone calls from police warning them to 'be careful.' In some cases, they stopped blogging for a while.

If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China.

Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.

Seemingly small choices and small actions add up over time.

Whether or not Americans supported George W. Bush, they could not avoid learning about Abu Ghraib.

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.

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.

In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.

Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.

Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so.