Rebecca MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she conducts research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression, and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. Her first book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, will be published in January 2012 by Basic Books.

MacKinnon is cofounder of Global Voices Online (globalvoicesonline.org), a global citizen media network. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative to promote the upholding of basic principles on free expression and privacy in the ICT sector. (globalnetworkinitiative.org)

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon worked as a journalist for CNN in Beijing for nine years including as Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001; then as CNN’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03. From 2004-06 she was a Research Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she began her ongoing research and writing about Chinese Internet censorship in addition to launching Global Voices Online. In 2007-08 she taught online journalism at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre. In 2009 she conducted research and writing as an Open Society Institute Fellow, and in the Spring of 2010 she was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center or Information Technology Policy.

MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard College and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan in 1991-92.

In Sessions as Speaker: