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Quotes from the Conference

Day One quotes

Hopes and Fears

Helen Clark – UNDP

• “ICT plays a catalytic role in human development by linking remote health clinics with specialist diagnostic centres we have seen improvements in maternal and child health outcomes. BY linking students in rural areas with teachers and the wealth of knowledge available in cyberspace, we have witnessed transformation in the education sector.”
• “ICTs are highly relevant to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.”
• “The Arab spring used Facebook to mobilise, twitter to live stream and YouTube to report.”

Carl Bildt, Sweden

• “We are in the midst of the most radical scientific revolution ever seen.”
• “Science has turned fiction into reality.”
• “A net that is stifled risks losing its transformative powers”
• “Never security without freedom: that would take us backwards.”
• “There will be no hidden corners of our world any longer. There will be no dark spaces for dark acts.”

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia

• “Assume good faith (fundamental principle in Wikipedia moderation)”

Atiaf Alwazir, Yemeni activist

• “Internet has broken fear and silence”
• “There is a world of global online solidarity”
• “Twitter and Facebook did not cause revolutions, but were catalysts”

Sachin Pilot, India

• “The internet is arguably the most important invention of the last century”
• “Ensuring cyber security is hard because it is global and digital footprints are hard to track”

Lord Richard Allan, Facebook

• “We are at the tipping point, when the debate around the internet moves to centre stage”
• “It’s not enough to see Governments’ answers, people want to see the workings too”

Eric Van Der Kleij, Tech City

• “Key message from entrepreneurs: please talk to us! Please don’t mess up!”

Cyberspace and the Networked World

Joe Biden, Vice President of the US

• “We are here so that tomorrow, when a village in India opens the doors to it’s first internet café, a school in Kenya cuts a ribbon on its new computer lab, a teenager in Guatemala writes his first blog post and a grandfather in London writes his first email, they will be free to explore all the benefits of the internet.”
• “The Internet is the public space of the 21st century. This generation will transform cyberspace, and cyberspace in turn has the potential to transform their lives.”
• “Existing principles of international law apply online just as they do offline. The Internet presents new challenges but we do not need to start from scratch.”

Economic Growth and Development

Uri Rosenthal, Dutch Foreign Minister

• “Government, the corporate world and civil society need to work together to secure cyberspace.”
• “60 governments are blocking access to the internet for their citizens.”

James Manyika, McKinsey

• “It has taken 15 years for the internet to achieve a level of economic growth that it took the industrial revolution 50 years to achieve.”

Verizon, floor speaker

• "Mobile users will consume 60 times more bandwidth by 2015 (challenge to governments and business in the provision of infrastructure).”

Yu Zhou, Tudou.com

• “By 2013 there will be 700 million internet users in China. “
• “Everyone is a director of their own life" [personal video content uploaded to the internet]

Dorothy Atwood, Disney

• "The Disney movie “Cars 2” will be available on the Tudou (Chinese YouTube) platform"

Social Benefits

President Toomas Ilves, Estonia

• “You cannot bribe a computer”

Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute

• “Social mobilisation is more effective and more volatile because of the internet.”

Ahmed Ashour, Al Jazeera

• “The virtual world is the real world.”

Policing in the Cyber Age

Lee Miles, SOCA

• “There is a need for an improvement in the prevention and disruption of serious organised crime. This requires a concerted effort working with law enforcement agencies, industry and government.”

Simulating what a cyber attack looks like

William Beer, PricewaterhouseCoopers

• “Leaders need to know about data losses just as much as they know about financial losses.”