Leadership Quote by Stephen Cambone

Bureaucracies love to count with words when they can’t count with outcomes, and “Thirdly” is doing a lot of cover here. Stephen Cambone’s line is classic early-2000s national-security managerial speak: a procedural drumbeat (“as we move through this process”) that reassures listeners there’s a plan, while carefully refusing to say what the plan will actually do to power, oversight, or civil liberties.

The surface intent is modernization. “Integrating the communications” sounds like harmless back-office plumbing, but the subtext is consolidation: linking systems, standards, and access across agencies that historically kept data siloed for legal and institutional reasons. Post-9/11 Washington treated “integration” as both a technical upgrade and a moral imperative, a way to turn “failure to connect the dots” into a mandate to connect everything.

Then comes the tell: “emulate more of the World Wide Web.” That metaphor imports the Web’s strengths (speed, interoperability, searchability, network effects) into government work. It also imports the Web’s weaknesses: pervasive collection, blurred boundaries, and the quiet assumption that if something can be linked, it should be. “Emulate” is a safe verb; it promises the benefits of the Internet without committing to its openness. In practice, it often means building a Web-like architecture with none of the public accountability that made the Web politically palatable.

The sentence’s real job is rhetorical: it frames a major shift in surveillance and information-sharing as an inevitable evolution, not a contested choice. The future arrives as process, not policy.