Rebecca MacKinnon
In China's big cities, American products - say, for instance, Proctor and Gamble shampoos or many other goods - are widely coveted by a lot of Chinese consumers.
Many of the Kuomintang elite in Taiwan have relatives among the ruling elite here on mainland China.
In Britain, a 'block list' of harmful Web sites, used by all the major Internet Service Providers, is maintained by a private foundation with little transparency and no judicial or government oversight of the list.
I am well aware of the facts presented by numerous security experts on the many ways in which the United States' digital networks have come under siege by cybercriminals and under daily assault by hackers in league with various foreign governments.
The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.
We're going to get the Internet we deserve, and those people who are the most active in shaping the Internet to their liking are going to win out.
I haven't heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China.
Right after September 11, 2001, there weren't really any blogs in China, but there were a lot of Chinese chatrooms - and there were a lot of conversations in which Chinese netizens were saying things like, 'served them right.' That was definitely not the official Chinese government policy - which condemned the terrorists.
I lived in China for 9 years straight. I saw how my Chinese friends benefited and gained much more freedom to determine the course of their lives, their jobs, their creative works, and their identities over the course of a decade. Much of this increased freedom is thanks to economic engagement by the West.
I do not know of a Chinese blogger who has gone to jail, but I know several who have had their blogs shut down. I also know some Chinese bloggers who have received threatening phone calls from police warning them to 'be careful.' In some cases, they stopped blogging for a while.
We must all rise to the challenge to demonstrate that security and prosperity in the Internet age are not only compatible with liberty, they ultimately depend on it.
For years, members of Congress have heard from constituents who want them to protect the nation from crime, terrorism and intellectual property violation. They have not faced equally robust demands that online rights and freedoms be preserved.
Congress may not get the Internet, but the Internet doesn't get Congress, either.
Internet companies created the social-media tools that fueled the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street insurgencies, and that have helped political candidates rally grass-roots support.
It's much easier to force intermediary communications and Internet companies such as Google to police themselves and their users than the alternatives: sending cops after everybody who attempts a risque or politically sensitive search, getting parents and teachers to do their jobs, or chasing down the origin of every offending link.
Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don't know.
On March 5, 2011, protesters stormed the Egyptian state security headquarters. In real time, activists shared their discoveries on Twitter as they moved through a building that had until recently been one of the Mubarak regime's largest torture facilities.
It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression and instead to address the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good and minimize the evil.
Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.
Digital power is every bit as likely to be abused as physical power, but is often more insidious because it is often wielded in the background until its results manifest themselves in the offline world.
I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.
Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.
Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.
Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.
WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.
Research In Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, has been asked by a range of governments to comply with surveillance requirements.
The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.
In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt - something that also happened in Xinjiang - I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.
I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market - which is a big enough challenge even for the established players - that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture.
People in China have a range of strong views about how children should be protected when they go online and whether the responsibility should be with the government, with parents, or somebody else.
Most people who use the Internet seem take its nature and characteristics for granted, like we take air and water for granted.
The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.
In the physical world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a wanted man.
Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces.
Shibuya is a trendy part of Tokyo where young people come to meet and have a good time.
Increasingly, corporate executives who don't speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.
After the non-Japanese Carlos Ghosn was brought in by Nissan to turn around the struggling auto manufacturer, he made English the company's official working language.
In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.
We willingly share personal information with companies for the convenience of using their products.
I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.
While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.
The way I think liberties get eroded is not that all of a sudden you become an Orwellian state, but gradually it becomes harder for people with unpopular views to speak out without being in danger, be it from the state or just from the majority of the people who don't like them.
In the future, 'the networked' will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.
Seemingly small choices and small actions add up over time.
You don't have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.
When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.
Anything illegal under Chinese law is, of course, not protected by copyright.
If China someday gains a more fair, just, and accountable system of government, it will be due to the hard work and efforts of the Chinese people, not due to the inexorable workings of any particular technology.