Quotes from Rebecca MacKinnon

There is a widening gap between the middle-aged-to-older generation, who still read newspapers and watch CCTV news, and the Internet generation.

In the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.

WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.

There isn't much question that the person who obtained the WikiLeaks cables from a classified U.S. government network broke U.S. law and should expect to face the consequences. The legal rights of a website that publishes material acquired from that person, however, are much more controversial.

Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.

A number of countries, including Russia and China, have put forward proposals to regulate aspects of the Internet like 'crime' and 'security' that are currently unregulated at the global level due to lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens' rights.

Right after September 11, 2001, there weren't really any blogs in China, but there were a lot of Chinese chatrooms - and there were a lot of conversations in which Chinese netizens were saying things like, 'served them right.' That was definitely not the official Chinese government policy - which condemned the terrorists.

Internet freedom is a bit of a Rorschach test: it means different things to different people.

Citizens' rights cannot be protected if their digital activities are governed and policed by opaque and publicly unaccountable corporate mechanisms.

As in Pakistan, Tunisian and Egyptian human rights activists are concerned that any censorship mechanisms, once put in place, will inevitably be abused for political purposes no matter what censorship proponents claim to the contrary.

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.

There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.

We willingly share personal information with companies for the convenience of using their products.

I lived in China for 9 years straight. I saw how my Chinese friends benefited and gained much more freedom to determine the course of their lives, their jobs, their creative works, and their identities over the course of a decade. Much of this increased freedom is thanks to economic engagement by the West.

The critical question is: How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy?

Radio was used powerfully by Josef Goebbels to disseminate Nazi propaganda, and just as powerfully by King George VI to inspire the British people to fight invasion.

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.

Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces.

It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan.

Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.

The only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and ... the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.

Professional camera crews are rarely there when a bomb goes off or a rocket lands. They usually show up afterwards.

Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.