Top 100 Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes
#1. Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#2. While the Internet can't be controlled 100 percent, it's possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#3. The critical question is: How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy?
Rebecca MacKinnon
#4. Almost every week, there are stories in the press or on Chinese social media about what even the official Chinese media call 'hot online topics:' stories about how people in a particular village or town used Weibo to expose malfeasance by local or regional authorities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#5. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#6. There is a broad movement that has been holding companies accountable on human rights for a long time.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#7. We're at a point in history that whether the Internet is going to evolve in a way that's compatible with democracy and human rights is really kind of up in the air.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#8. 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
#9. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#10. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#11. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#12. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#13. I am well aware of the facts presented by numerous security experts on the many ways in which the United States' digital networks have come under siege by cybercriminals and under daily assault by hackers in league with various foreign governments.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#14. Even in democratic society, we don't have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#15. It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression and instead to address the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good and minimize the evil.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#16. So long as confusion reigns, there will be no successful global Internet agenda, only contradiction.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#17. Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through 'like' buttons and universal logins - giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#18. Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their 'patriotism.'
Rebecca MacKinnon
#19. The sovereigns of the Internet are acting like they have a divine right to govern.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#20. Human rights in cyberspace are really no different from rights in the physical world.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#21. In the physical world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a wanted man.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#26. The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#27. Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#28. Freedom only remains healthy if we think about the implications of what we do on a day-to-day basis.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#29. Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#30. 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
#31. Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#32. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#34. Google's entire business model and its planning for the future are banking on an open and free Internet. And it will not succeed if the Internet becomes overly balkanized.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#35. The Chinese government sometimes shuts down the Internet and mobile services in specific areas where unrest occurs.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#36. For years, members of Congress have heard from constituents who want them to protect the nation from crime, terrorism and intellectual property violation. They have not faced equally robust demands that online rights and freedoms be preserved.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#37. Negative views of Pakistan expressed by prominent members of the global business community are taken more seriously by government functionaries than are appeals by human rights groups.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#38. The Chinese government clearly sees Internet and mobile innovation as a major driver of its global economic competitiveness going forward.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#39. 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
#40. The relationship between citizens and government is increasingly mediated through the Internet.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#41. The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#42. Companies should have a due diligence process to determine the likelihood that their technologies will be used to carry out human rights abuses before doing business with a particular country or distributor.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#43. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#45. 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
#46. I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#47. Microsoft, Yahoo and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#48. 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
#49. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#50. If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#51. The Egyptian Revolution makes it clear, if anybody was in doubt, that digital technologies are going to play a powerful role in the future of global politics.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#52. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#53. There is clearly a constituency that appreciates the message that Google is sending, that it finds the Chinese government's attitude to the Internet and censorship unacceptable.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#54. 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
#55. While Google no longer has a search engine operation inside China, it has maintained a large presence in Beijing and Shanghai focused on research and development, advertising sales, and mobile platform development.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#56. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#57. Normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, combined with economic reforms and opening, transformed the Chinese people's lives.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#58. In China, the problem is that with the system of censorship that's now in place, the user doesn't know to what extent, why, and under what authority there's been censorship. There's no way of appealing. There's no due process.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#59. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#60. There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#61. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#62. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the computer code that led to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990, he did not try to patent or charge fees for the use of his technology.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#63. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#64. Professional camera crews are rarely there when a bomb goes off or a rocket lands. They usually show up afterwards.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#65. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#66. Whether or not the U.S. government funds circumvention tools, or who exactly it funds and with what amount, it is clear that Internet users in China and elsewhere are seeking out and creating their own ad hoc solutions to access the uncensored global Internet.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#67. I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#68. 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
#69. The erosion of privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, written to protect us against unreasonable search and seizure, began in earnest under President George W. Bush.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#70. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#71. People in China have a range of strong views about how children should be protected when they go online and whether the responsibility should be with the government, with parents, or somebody else.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#72. One day, people in China may be able to see the records of conversations between multinational tech companies and the Chinese authorities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#73. In the future, 'the networked' will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#74. After Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010 that Internet freedom would be a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, the State Department decided to take what Clinton calls a 'venture capital' approach to the funding of tools, research, public information projects, and training.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#75. Can companies just claim a total lack of political responsibility in how their technology is used in all instances? It's something that companies should be thinking about when they sell their technologies around the world.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#76. Over time, if you want rights, you have to also show that you can use them responsibly and that you can build a positive world in the online space, and that's also very important.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#77. 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
#78. One thing is very clear from the chatter I see on Chinese blogs, and also from just what people in China tell me, is that Google is much more popular among China's Internet users than the United States.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#79. Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#80. What role did the Internet play in the Egyptian Revolution? People will be arguing about the answer to that question for decades if not centuries.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#81. 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
#82. Whether or not Americans supported George W. Bush, they could not avoid learning about Abu Ghraib.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#83. Citizens continue to demand government help in fighting cybercrime, defending children from stalkers and bullies, and protecting consumers.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#84. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#85. Political activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan use Facebook as their primary tool to mobilize support for their causes and activities.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#86. 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
#87. On Apple's special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer. Apple similarly censors apps for iPads sold in China.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#88. 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.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#89. Microsoft runs the world's biggest blogging platform, MSN Spaces.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#90. 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
#91. 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
#93. Despite the Obama administration's proclaimed commitment to global Internet freedom, the executive branch is not transparent about the types and capabilities of surveillance technologies it is sourcing and purchasing - or about what other governments are purchasing the same technology.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#94. WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#96. There is no country on Earth where Internet and telecommunications companies do not face at least some pressure from governments to do things that would potentially infringe on users' rights to free expression and privacy.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#97. It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#98. 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
#99. China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#100. In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.
Rebecca MacKinnon
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