Wyden Firsts: Our Digital Future

Ron has been described as the “internet’s senator” who “has undoubtedly done more to shape tech policy in the United States than almost any other lawmaker.” In this field, he keeps generating firsts: blowing the whistle on phone companies that share our data with sleazy bounty hunters, singling out discrimination in algorithms, and advocating that the executives at the largest technology companies be held personally liable to their millions of customers for lying about their companies’ privacy policies.

Ron was the first member of Congress to organize grassroots internet activists in a campaign to protect a free and open internet. With a Senate vote coming to override Ron’s hold on a bill that would have gutted a free and open internet, more than ten million Americans weighed in against the badly flawed “PIPA/SOPA” legislation. In the face of the grassroots coalition and enormous opposition to overriding Ron’s hold, the Senate leadership retreated and canceled the vote.

Ron wrote the first tough privacy law to protect Americans traveling overseas, vital to our soldiers. Ron put it bluntly: “an American doesn’t lose their privacy rights at the border.”

Ron was the first federal legislator to recognize the economic importance of nanotechnology and wrote the bipartisan 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act. The law was essential to helping Oregon’s public universities team up with industry partners to promote nanomaterials in agriculture, health, energy and other fields.