Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) gave the keynote address on Wednesday at RightsCon in San Francisco. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

SAN FRANCISCO—This past week hundreds of lawyers, technologists, journalists, activists, and others from around the globe descended upon a university conference center to try to figure out the state of digital rights in 2016. The conference, appropriately dubbed “RightsCon,” featured many notable speakers, including Edward Snowden via video-conference, but relatively few from those inside government.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), however, was an exception. On the first day of the conference, he gave an in-person speech, in which he argued for a “New Compact for Security and Liberty.”

The Oregon senator is likely familiar to Ars readers: he’s been one of the most consistently critical voices of the expansion of government surveillance in recent years. We last spoke with him in October 2014 when he made the case that expanded active spying hurts the American economy. In December 2014, Wyden introduced the “Secure Data Act” in the United States Senate, which aims to shut down government-ordered backdoors into digital systems. However, that bill hasn’t even made it to committee yet, over a year later.