Rebecca MacKinnon

Rebecca MacKinnon directs the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America, developing a system to rank Internet, telecommunications, and other tech companies on respect for users’ free expression and privacy. She is author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online. MacKinnon was a founding Board member of the Global Network Initiative and is currently on the Board of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent first in China and then Japan between 1998-2004. More recently, she taught at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre in 2007 and 2008, was a 2013 adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is currently a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communication Studies. She has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein and Berkman Centers, the Open Society Foundations, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and the New America Foundation. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. She lives in Washington, D.C.