Quotes from Rebecca MacKinnon

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

Nothing ever goes as planned in China.

I know plenty of people in China who don't like what their government does to the Falun Gong, but they don't want to entrust their data to the Falun Gong, either.

There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.

There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.

Research In Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, has been asked by a range of governments to comply with surveillance requirements.

If I were a Chinese dissident, I'd be grateful that Cisco had helped bring the Internet to China, but I'd also be outraged that Cisco may have helped the cops keep me under surveillance and catch me trying to organize protest activities.

China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.

The U.S. relationship with Bahrain is obviously more complicated than with Syria and Iran.

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.

In Britain, a 'block list' of harmful Web sites, used by all the major Internet Service Providers, is maintained by a private foundation with little transparency and no judicial or government oversight of the list.

Only about 10 percent of India's population uses the web, making it unlikely that Internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon.

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.

Nobody is forcing anybody who is uncomfortable with the terms of service to use Facebook. Executives point out that Internet users have choices on the Web.

I haven't heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China.

In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.

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.

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.

It would be normal for anybody running a high-profile, politically controversial operation in China to anticipate worst-case scenario, and to do everything possible to guard against them.

The Internet is a politically contested space.

A lot of Chinese don't understand why people in the West are critical of China.

China's censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated.

Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people's online activity.

There is a great deal of concern in the Chinese military that Taiwan's reunification with China is drifting further and further away.