Leadership Quote by Darrell Issa

Issa’s line plays like a security briefing engineered for maximum political leverage: start with a sweeping threat ("Every ISP"), widen the perimeter to include enemies "in the United States and outside", then pivot from the relatively abstract fear of surveillance to the more visceral dread of takeover and theft. It’s a classic escalation strategy. Privacy invasion is bad, sure, but "take control of computers" lands harder because it implies helplessness, violated autonomy, and cascading economic harm. The rhetoric is less about a technical claim than about manufacturing urgency.

The subtext is jurisdictional and legislative. By painting attacks as ubiquitous and borderless, Issa implicitly argues that normal market incentives and piecemeal enforcement can’t cope; only state capacity can. The phrasing blurs distinctions between criminals, competitors, activists, and nation-states, collapsing them into a single shadowy "those who want to". That vagueness is useful: it invites listeners to supply their preferred villain while consenting to broad countermeasures.

Context matters: Issa has long operated at the intersection of oversight theater and cybersecurity politics, where hearings often double as messaging campaigns. The line also quietly nudges the audience away from the uncomfortable question of who else is "invading people's privacy" - including governments and the surveillance-adjacent business models of the internet itself. By framing privacy threats as external attacks on ISPs and users, he positions industry and state as co-defenders, not potential aggressors. The result is a call to rally around security, even if the price is more power for the institutions promising to provide it.