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Rebecca MacKinnon is a co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online, where she's also a blogger. In addition, she's director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation, developing a methodology to rank Internet, telecommunications, and other ICT sector companies on free expression and privacy criteria. A pilot study will be conducted in 2014, then an annual index or ranking of companies will be launched in 2015.
 
MacKinnon is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies and was a 2013 adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  Previously a senior research fellow and Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation, MacKinnon is author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012). She serves on the boards of directors of the Global Network Initiative and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
 
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent in China and Japan in the late 90s and early 00’s.  In 2007-08 she taught online journalism and conducted research on Chinese Internet censorship at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. She has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Publicy Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
 
MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan. She lives in Washington D.C.