Cantwell probably sealed her rep as a staunch advocate for cyberights and the tech industry back as a congresswoman in the early 90s when she led the fight against President Clinton’s invasive Clipper Chip legislation. (The Clipper Chip program, which failed, would have forced telecommunications companies to adopt the government’s encryption code—giving the NSA access to all private data transmission.)

Well, according to the new rankings from CNET, she’s still earning her reputation with techies: CNET rated Cantwell the #1 Democratic Senator on tech issues.

If you ask me, though, Cantwell should have scored higher than she did. (They gave her a 67). If you click on her name to look at how she voted on CNET’s top issues, you wont find her dissident committe vote for Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality never made it to the floor, so I guess CNET didn’t count it???

UPDATE
Or maybe, as someone suggests over at Postman’s blog post about this, CNET isn’t much concerned with cyberights issues and only looks at votes dealing with the corporate bottom line.

Although, I’m not sure that’s right. CNET does look at things like the “Unconstitutional” Communications Decency Act, as they put it. Although, on the other hand, it’s hard to tell how CNET actually wanted Senators to vote on some other issues…and/or what the vote meant. For example, I can’t figure out CNET’s take on the scary sounding “Creating a national ID card and linking computer databases” vote.

McGavick, at odds with Puget Sound industry giants like Microsoft and Amazon.com, was against the Net Neutrality amendment.