Quotes from Rebecca MacKinnon

Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.

It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.

In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.

Governments clash with each other over who should control the co-ordination of the Internet's infrastructure and critical resources.

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.

It's time to take decisive action to stop American and other multinationals from aiding and abetting the wrong side in the global digital arms race.

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.

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.

Google transformed the way most of us get our information with a search engine that enables us to find citizen-created media content alongside the work of professionals.

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.

Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail.

Tactically, yelling at Google is unwise.

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.

Over the past several decades, a growing number of investors have been choosing to put their money in funds that screen companies for their environmental and labor records. Some socially responsible investors are starting to add free expression and privacy to their list of criteria.

As a condition for entry into the Chinese market, Apple had to agree to the Chinese government's censorship criteria in vetting the content of all iPhone apps available for download on devices sold in mainland China.

When Google went into China, there were some people who said they shouldn't compromise at all - that it is very bad for human rights to do so. But there were other people, particularly Chinese people, who said they were glad Google had gone in.

If China someday gains a more fair, just, and accountable system of government, it will be due to the hard work and efforts of the Chinese people, not due to the inexorable workings of any particular technology.

Pretty much anybody who does creative work in China navigates the gray zone. People aren't clear about where the line is any more, beyond which life gets really nasty and you become a dissident without having intended ever to be one.

In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states.

Microsoft runs the world's biggest blogging platform, MSN Spaces.

The Chinese government clearly sees Internet and mobile innovation as a major driver of its global economic competitiveness going forward.

Digital activism did not spring immaculately out of Twitter and Facebook. It's been going on ever since blogs existed.

On March 5, 2011, protesters stormed the Egyptian state security headquarters. In real time, activists shared their discoveries on Twitter as they moved through a building that had until recently been one of the Mubarak regime's largest torture facilities.

Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.