Politics & Power Quote by Jo Ann Davis

A mild sentence with a hard edge: “imperative” isn’t a suggestion, it’s a mandate dressed up as common sense. Jo Ann Davis is speaking in the clipped, managerial voice of late-20th/early-2000s governance, when “electronic information storage and communication” was becoming the default infrastructure of everything from banking to battlefield logistics. The phrase is deliberately bloodless. It avoids saying “internet,” “surveillance,” “hackers,” or “privacy,” because naming the conflict would invite it. Instead, the language laundered into bureaucratic neutrality does the political work: it frames change as inevitable, and resistance as irresponsible.

The specific intent is to justify legal updating as a matter of national maintenance. “Our Government” is a telling choice: not “agencies,” not “Congress,” not “the executive branch,” but a unified actor, implying coherence and authority. That rhetorical unity matters because security policy thrives on speed and centralization; presenting government as one body makes expanded powers feel like routine housekeeping.

The subtext rides on a post-9/11 anxiety that rewired American policymaking. “Information security” can mean protecting systems from intrusion, but it also conveniently shades into controlling information flows, tightening access, expanding monitoring, and criminalizing certain digital behaviors. The quote’s strength is its asymmetry: it foregrounds a real vulnerability (digital dependence) while leaving the costs (civil liberties, transparency, overclassification, mission creep) offstage. It works because it offers a story of modernization without admitting it’s also a story about power.