Rebecca MacKinnon is director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation, developing a system to rank the world's most powerful Internet, telecommunications, and other ICT sector companies on free expression and privacy criteria.
Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012), MacKinnon is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online, whose Board of Directors she presently chairs. She also serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and was a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative. She is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies. Before launching Ranking Digital Rights, she was a senior research fellow (2012-2013) and Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow (2010-2012) at the New America Foundation.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief from 1998-2001 and Tokyo Bureau Chief from 2001-2003. Since leaving CNN in 2004 she has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Public Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. For two years in 2007-2008 she served on the faculty of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre and taught as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Fall 2013. She received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan.