Politics & Power Quote by Darrell Issa

Issa’s line is a politician’s attempt to make an invisible threat feel physical: “every portal” turns routers, servers, and login pages into border crossings. It’s a rhetorical move with consequences. By framing cyberspace as a national perimeter under siege, he borrows the emotional grammar of homeland security - invasion, vigilance, defense - and applies it to the messy, distributed reality of the Internet.

The phrasing is tellingly slippery. “Harvest information” makes hacking sound like industrial-scale extraction, a steady vacuum rather than a series of discrete crimes. That image encourages a policy response that’s equally industrial: broad surveillance powers, expanded agency authority, tougher penalties. He tries to yoke “national security secrets” to “just the common information of private individuals,” collapsing two categories that, in law and practice, demand very different safeguards. The subtext: if everyday privacy is on the same continuum as state secrets, then extraordinary security measures can be sold as ordinary protection.

The stumble - “private individuals and private individuals” - reads less like emphasis than haste, the kind of redundancy that shows up when a speaker is racing to land a point before skepticism kicks in. And the punchline, “a single entity known as the Internet,” is the most revealing simplification. Treating the Internet as one thing makes it governable in the public imagination, even if it’s technically incoherent. The intent isn’t to map the network accurately; it’s to consolidate fear into a single target that legislation can plausibly “fix.”