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A Rhetorical Hermeneutics of Danger: Leaks in the Digital Age

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A Rhetorical Hermeneutics of Danger: Leaks in the Digital Age A Rhetorical Hermeneutics of Danger: Leaks in the Digital Age. A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Daniel Ladislau Horvath IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisor Ronald Walter Greene May 2015 © Daniel Ladislau Horvath 2015 Acknowledgements I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my mentor and advisor, Dr. Ronald Walter Greene. His truly inspiring work and his gentle soul have defined the trajectory of my entire academic career. I also want to thank my committee—Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Dr. Arthur Walzer, Dr. Edward Schiappa—for their hard work and, above all, for their patience. Their attentive reading and thoughtful feedback have shaped the present argument, made me a better writer, and helped me become a more discerning thinker. I would also like to thank my writing and support group—Dr. Shannon Stevens, Erin Cole, and Dr. Dana Schowalter—for their unwavering support. My appreciation goes to the larger UMN family as well—professors, friends, colleagues—as integral parts of the universe that made this project possible. I also want to mention all my professors at UNLV who encouraged me to pursue my studies, none more adamantly so than my MA advisor Dr. Donovan Conley. On a personal note, my sister, Edith, my brother in law, Robert, and my niece, Petra, have provided a home far from home. I would not have survived let alone thrived in the U.S. without their love and support. I am also grateful for my parents’ patience. Silvia and Vasile paid the steepest price for my success: not being able to see their son in person for the last 10 years. Finally, I owe a debt that can never be repaid to my partner, Dr. Shannon Stevens, who has provided the very “conditions of possibility" for something like this to exist. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to those whose lives are interwoven in the texture of this project: Shannon, Betty, Ziggy, and Muggsey. ii Abstract For the past 10 years, unauthorized disclosures of classified information have become a permanent fixture of our political landscape. Their frequency, magnitude, and commonality have engendered competing discourses that rhetorically articulate the act of disclosure to transparency and accountable governance or, respectively, to threat and national security. Through an analysis of the legislative history of FOIA, internal documents from various state institutions aiming to deter such disclosures, and public statements from people indicted of leaking classified information, this dissertation investigates how truth of and about government becomes problematized, how its accessibility, its subjects authorized to speak, and its threatening others are shaped, defined, and put into political play. This dissertation traces through this legislative history the “will to truth in politics” and “national security” as distinct logics of organizing truth of and about government whose dialectic results in a “multilayered architecture of access” by which the discursive field is controlled through divisions between licit and illicit objects of discourse, lawful and unlawful circuits of discursive flow, as well as authorized and unauthorized subjects. This structured access is complemented by an “insider threat apparatus” that defines potential leakers as “insider threats,” as individuals with a propensity to commit a crime and thus as targets of surveillance and intervention. The counter-discourse, to these institutional attempts to conflate leaking and treason, links a parrhesiastic irruption of truth to the most important ideals of the democratic imaginary: transparency, accountability, and informed citizenry. The “rhetoric of parrhesia,” however, is not so much a counter-discourse as it is the dialectical other of iii the “rhetorical hermeneutics of dangerousness.” Both are deployed as technologies of interpretation that distribute discourses, institutions, and populations onto a political field of action structured by the issue of access to information. In the end, this study illuminates how Foucauldian Rhetoric is less of a rhetorical hermeneutics to uncover the power of discourse but a way to investigate how a rhetorical hermeneutics is put into operation by an apparatus to uncover problems and threats. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. I Dedication .......................................................................................................................... II Abstract .............................................................................................................................III Chapter I. Unauthorized Disclosures and Rhetoric via Foucault ........................................1 “Please Turn Off and Stow All Electronic Devices” ..............................................1 Foucauldian rhetoric as critical sensitivity .............................................................4 “The map is not the territory” ...............................................................................26 Chapter II. “The Fellowship of Discourse:” Secrecy, Disclosures, and Dangerous Discourse in US Jurisprudence and Legal Practice .......................................................... 30 (1) To be “In the Know”: FOIA as Will to Truth in Politics ................................38 (1)(a) Will to Truth in Politics ..................................................................42 (1)(b) Licit and Illicit Objects of Discourse ..............................................52 (1)(c) “Truth, Delayed:” Licit and Illicit Circuits of Discursive Flow .....59 (1)(d) “The Fellowship of Discourse:” On the Community in the Know 70 (1)(e) Freedom and Information ...............................................................73 (2) “Rare Subjects:” On Whistleblowers and Spies ..............................................74 (3) Of Dangerous Speech ......................................................................................90 (4) Conclusion: Logophobia ...............................................................................101 v Chapter III. The New Delinquent of the Digital Age: The Whistleblower as “Insider Threat” ............................................................................................................................ 104 Introduction .........................................................................................................104 The Whistleblowers as “Insider Threats” ............................................................109 The New Delinquent of the Digital Age .............................................................115 The Metonymical Logic of the Insider Threat Apparatus ..................................124 The Insider Threat as Metonymical Subject .......................................................129 The Constitution of a Field of Knowledge .........................................................135 “If You See Something, Say Something”: Power and Visibility in Panopticon .145 Conclusion: The Insider Threat Apparatus and the Carceral Archipelago .........149 Chapter IV. “But What of the Man?” From Manning to Snowden, the Leaker as Parrhesiastes....................................................................................................................157 “The Big Brother is Watching You” The Orwellian Government ......................159 “Habermas was Right:” Transparency, Criticism, and Control ..........................169 “I am a ‘Transparency Advocate:’” On Frankness, Truth and Criticism ...........177 “Wouldn’t You Go To Prison To Help End This War?” On Duty, Danger, and Civic Courage .....................................................................................................191 Chapter V. A Rhetorical Hermeneutics of Danger .........................................................210 Endnotes ...........................................................................................................................222 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................235 vi Chapter I: Unauthorized Disclosures and Rhetoric via Foucault I have never tried to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted.1 “Please turn off and stow all electronic devices” “I genuinely believe that the story that’s the biggest one—that will make the biggest impact and will shape how the events of the last 10 months are viewed by history—is the story on which we’re currently working,” claimed Glenn Greenwald, the famous journalist that broke the Edward Snowden story, in an 2014 interview with Stephen Colbert.2 Whether we choose to accept the label “the biggest one” or simply read this quote as a common journalistic teaser announcing the next story is less relevant than the seemingly inevitable fact of its occurrence. Disclosures are now common. With documents from only one source, in this case Snowden, news of the existence of a global surveillance machine with all its manifold incarnations, with studied pace, has steadily become part of the public knowledge for over a year now. We live in, what we might be inclined to call, the digital leaks era. While leaks to the press are nothing new, the provisional origin point of this era of digital leaks can be set with the release in 2010 of the “Collateral
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