Top 207 Quotes & Sayings by Rebecca MacKinnon
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Rebecca MacKinnon.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.
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.
Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power.
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 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.
The critical question is: How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy?
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.
Internet freedom is not possible without freedom from fear, and users will not be free from fear unless they are sufficiently protected from online theft and attack.
Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.
Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.
There's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.
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.
We have to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the Internet, not just passive users. I don't see how we can bring about change in our digital lives if we don't take responsibility.
There is a widening gap between the middle-aged-to-older generation, who still read newspapers and watch CCTV news, and the Internet generation.
The better-informed we are, the more we can do to make sure what's happening is in our interests and is accountable to us.
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.
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.
Companies have choices to make about what extent they're handling their users' content.
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.
Nothing ever goes as planned in China.
The user in China wants the same thing that any Internet user wants - privacy in conversations, maximum access to information, and the ability to speak their minds online.
Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.
Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution.
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.
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.
If you just technically adhere to the law, sometimes that's enough, sometimes it's not; it's really hard to predict. There is definitely a possibility that the Chinese authorities won't find it sufficient.
It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights.
Freedom only remains healthy if we think about the implications of what we do on a day-to-day basis.
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.
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.
Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail.
There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.
While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sohu will protect you from yourself.
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.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.
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.
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.
Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their 'patriotism.'
The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.
You don't have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.
There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.
Facebook has a rule that you're not supposed to be anonymous.
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.
There has been a rising tide of criticism about China's treatment of foreign companies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal.
Tactically, yelling at Google is unwise.
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.
QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.
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