Leadership Quote by Bill McCollum

A politician’s gift is to make hypocrisy sound like a policy problem, and Bill McCollum does it in one clean contrast. “We demand privacy” plants him on the side of ordinary people: anxious, surveilled, tired of being treated like data exhaust. Then he pivots to the uncomfortable part: “yet we glorify those that break into computers.” The “we” is doing double duty, accusing the public while politely including himself in the mess. It’s less a scold than a pressure test: if privacy is a civic value, why do we keep handing cultural cachet to its violators?

The line’s intent is to narrow the moral wiggle room around hacking. McCollum isn’t only talking about criminals; he’s pointing at the folk-hero aura that gathers around high-profile intrusions, whistleblowing leaks, and the media thrill of the “genius” outsider who embarrasses powerful institutions. “Glorify” is the tell: it’s a charge about our attention economy, where transgression can become branding. The subtext is that privacy can’t survive as a principle if it collapses into entertainment the moment someone breaches a firewall and produces a juicy narrative.

Context matters: coming from a politician of McCollum’s era, the quote slots neatly into late-20th/early-21st century anxieties about digital crime and national security, when computers stopped being tools and became infrastructure. It’s also a subtle argument for stronger enforcement: if culture won’t stop rewarding intrusion, the state will have to.