Rebecca MacKinnon Speaker & Booking Information

Rebecca MacKinnon is an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative and is currently director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

MacKinnon joined CNN in 1992 as Beijing Bureau Assistant and moved up to Producer/Correspondent by 1997 and Bureau Chief by 1998. In 2001 she became Tokyo Bureau Chief. During her time with CNN, she interviewed notable leaders including Junichiro Koizumi, Dalai Lama, Pervez Musharraf, and Mohammad Khatami. In the spring of 2004, MacKinnon was a fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. That summer, she joined Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society as a Research Fellow, where she remained until December 2006. Among her projects at the Berkman Center, MacKinnon founded Global Voices Online in collaboration with Ethan Zuckerman.

In January 2007 she joined the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong, where she remained until January 2009. From February 2009 to January 2010, she conducted research as an Open Society Fellow, funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute. Then in February 2010 she joined Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy where she is a visiting fellow, working on a book about the future of freedom in the Internet age. Regarding the Middle East, MacKinnon wrote that "the Internet empowers people and helps to bring about the peaceful changes associated with the Arab Spring". In September 2010, MacKinnon became a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. She is currently Director of the think tank's Ranking Digital Rights project developing a methodology to rank Internet, telecommunications, and other ICT sector companies on free expression and privacy criteria. In January 2007, she joined the inaugural Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board.