Leadership Quote by Stephen Cambone

Cambone’s line performs a classic Washington two-step: it normalizes a contested capability by comparing it to something mundane and widely loved. “Not much different” is doing the heavy lifting, collapsing the gap between everyday convenience (typing a query into Google) and whatever system he’s really talking about - typically large-scale, state-linked data integration. The rhetorical move isn’t to argue the ethics; it’s to dissolve them in a fog of familiarity.

The phrasing is tellingly bureaucratic. “Search engines… being constructed today” sounds like neutral infrastructure, as if surveillance or intelligence fusion were just another layer of the internet’s plumbing. “Users throughout the entire world” widens the frame to the point of abstraction: if everyone’s a user, no one is a target. That’s not accidental; it converts power asymmetry (the state querying you) into a consumer metaphor (you querying information). The subject who is searching, and the object being searched, blur into a single techy blur.

Context matters: Cambone operated in the post-9/11 security universe, where the pitch for expanded collection was often packaged as “connecting the dots.” His comparison borrows Silicon Valley’s legitimacy - speed, access, efficiency - to make institutional appetite for data seem like modernization rather than escalation. Subtext: if you accept search as benign, you’re nudged to accept the database behind it, the ingestion that feeds it, and the governance questions that trail it. The line isn’t about explaining policy; it’s about managing permission.