Courtesy New America

Rebecca MacKinnon is Director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation. She is author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (2012) and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online. MacKinnon serves on the Boards of Directors of the Global Network Initiative and the Committee to Protect Journalists. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent both in China and Japan.  She has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Publicy Policy and Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Fellowship, and Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy. In 2007-08 she taught at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan. She lives in Washington DC.