Rebecca MacKinnon: Take Back The Internet

Rebecca MacKinnon looks at issues of privacy, free expression and governance (or lack of) in the digital networks, platforms and services on which we are all increasingly dependent.

As we push more and more of our social lives online, should we be (and how should we be) regulating these networks? Is there a human rights penalty we pay for trusting basic human connection to the Internet?

As a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Rebecca MacKinnon looks at these big questions in her upcoming book, Consent of the Networked, “a treatise on the future of liberty in the Internet age.”

A former head of CNN’s Beijing and Tokyo bureaus, MacKinnon is an expert on Chinese Internet censorship. She’s one of the founders (with Ethan Zuckerman) of the Global Voices Online blog network, which aggregates and translates news around the world that might otherwise go unheard.Follw her tweets at @RMack.

She says: "The Egyptian Revolution makes it clear that digital technologies play a powerful role in global politics. But we should expect that role to be unpredictable."

Susan notes: Thanks to TED for making TED Talks downloadable and embeddable, and for providing the biographical information that goes along with them.