Rebecca MacKinnon is Vice President, Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, leading the Foundation’s efforts to promote and defend a legal and regulatory landscape essential to the future of free knowledge globally. Previously she was Founding Director of Ranking Digital Rights, a research program at New America that sets global standards for corporate respect for freedom of expression and privacy online. Author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (2012), she is co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, was a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, and served for over a decade on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Between 1998-2004 she was CNN’s Bureau Chief in Beijing and Tokyo.

She has taught at the University of Hong Kong and the University of Pennsylvania, and held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, the Open Society Foundations, and the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. She holds an AB magna cum laude in Government from Harvard and was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan.