Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Cambone

Cambone’s sentence is bureaucratic velvet over a steel policy shift: “making information more easily accessible” is the kind of phrase that sounds like modernization while quietly describing consolidation. The craft is in its softeners. “Over the course of two years” signals patience and inevitability, as if the destination emerged organically rather than being driven. “We arrived at a point” dodges agency; nobody decided, nobody pushed, history simply carried the institution there. That passive framing matters in the intelligence world, where power is exercised through process and where “who ordered this” is often the real question.

The overt intent is interoperability: after 9/11, “stovepipes” became the villain, and sharing became the virtue. Cambone, as a senior Defense Department intelligence figure, is speaking from the moment when the U.S. was trying to fuse military and civilian intelligence architectures, build common systems, and rewire incentives that once prized hoarding. “Value added” is management-speak doing political work: it turns a normative claim (we should share) into a seemingly measurable business case (sharing produces ROI), smoothing over civil liberties anxiety and interagency turf wars.

The subtext is that “accessibility” is never neutral. Easier access means broader reach, fewer friction points, more centralized standards, and often more surveillance capacity. The careful pairing of “defense and national” hints at the sensitive boundary being crossed: military intelligence logic bleeding into national intelligence priorities. It’s a pitch to treat information as an enterprise asset, while asking the audience not to dwell on what gets lost when secrecy’s gatekeepers are re-engineered.