Notes on the 4th edition___________________1 Introduction______________________________2 On Their Own Terms: A Lexicon with an Emphasis on Information-Related Terms How to Cite this Work___________________16 Produced by the U.S. Federal Government Creative Commons License______________16 4th edition June 16, 2009 Contact Information_____________________16 Susan L. Maret Ph.D. Terms Index_________________________17-30 Terms A-Z_________________________30-431 Notes on the 4th edition Since the first edition in 2005, On Their on Terms has reported language that reflects the scope of U.S. information policy. Now in its fourth edition, the Lexicon features new terms that further chronicle the federal narrative of information and its relationship to national security, intelligence operations, and freedom of information, privacy, technology, and surveillance as well as types of war, institutionalized secrecy, and censorship. This fourth edition of the Lexicon emphasizes the historical aspects of U.S. information policy and associated programs in that it is a testament to the information politics of the Bush- Cheney years; there is also a look back to historical agency recordkeeping practices such as the U.S. Army’s computerized personalities database, serendipitously discovered in a 1972 1 congressional hearing on military surveillance of civilians and the 1970s DoD program Project 2 Camelot, which has parallels with Project Minerva efforts to recruit academics. Including these programs alongside contemporary federal information initiatives and public policy critiques furthers the “history of ‘govermentality,’ ” an inquiry put forth by Michel Foucault (1994,1978: 219-222) that examines the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and 1 Does CIFA (the Counterintelligence Field Activity) have roots in the Army’s Counterintelligence Records Information System (CRIS), also called the Fort Monroe Data Bank? Or Talon? I leave it to FOIA researchers and historians to answer these questions; see Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis, available at The Memory Hole, http://www.thememoryhole.org/2009/05/army-surveillance/ and Uncle Sam is Watching You: Highlights from the Hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971). 2 For additional discussion of the role of academia and the military and university as “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory,” see John Armitage, “Beyond Hypermodern Militarized Knowledge Factories,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27 (2005):219–239 and Henry A. Giroux’s The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power.” This latter thought suggests an active, genealogical role for FOIA researchers, archivists, historians, information professionals, and public interest groups in not only rescuing lost histories but integrating findings into existing understanding of federal information practices. Throughout the Lexicon, links have been verified and replaced. However, in certain instances, Web pages and documents have been removed by the issuing federal agency. Considering the historical and archival importance of this information, links to the original source at the Wayback Machine is included. Introduction On Their Own Terms is a lexicon of information–rich terms created by the U.S. legislative, regulatory, and policy process, and routinized by various branches of the U.S. government. These terms represent a virtual seed catalog to federal informationally-driven procedures, policies, and practices involving among other matters, the information life cycle, record keeping, ownership over information, collection and analysis of intelligence information, security classification categories and markings, censorship, citizen right-to-know, deception, propaganda, secrecy, technology, surveillance, threat, national security, and forms of warfare. The abundance of federally produced information terms as reported in the Lexicon illustrates the sheer weight that rests on federal agencies in grappling with every aspect of information: communication, control, integrity, management, organization, preservation, production, and security. Lexicon terms also reflect the role federal agencies play in constructing a somewhat standardized, specialized language that orchestrates government policies and communicates national and international interests among fellow agencies, with Congress, the public, and the international community. In speaking of the specialized language of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) as an example, Lt. Col. Dana Flood (2008: 31) notes In the quarter-century of its existence, AFSPC has, like all large organizations, evolved over time to develop its own language, jargon, and terminology. Unfortunately, by accident, function, or design, AFSPC was largely a separate entity from the rest of the Air Force. Thus, like an isolated culture on a remote island, AFSPC’s language developed to a point that it became a separate dialect, sometimes incomprehensible to the parent Air Force culture. 2 Maret | On Their Own Terms While language provides a group the means to identify within a given culture or political entity (Mueller 1973: 18), theorists such as David John Farmer (1995:1) claim that language is “more than a tool for thinking, for conceiving and communicating thoughts;” it is also a “factory of ideas, approaches, intuitions, assumptions, and urges” that mirrors and shapes the lifeworld. In addition to “sanctifying action” (Edelman 1964: 114), Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1999:47) observes that language is not a “simple representation” of the world, but an intervention within it. Lecercle writes that “words do not only do things, they are things.” In his “Glossary of Dispossession,” writer Paul de Rooij observes “words are very important. Words frame issues, palliate, mollify, exculpate or even hide sordid acts.” Many terms reported in the Lexicon meet de Rooij’s description, representing a federal language of control that often downplays the significance of government actions, policies, and programs.3 “Firstfruits,” “National Censorship,” “Public Diplomacy,” and “Rendition,” couch questionable policies and practices, and serve to legitimate authority, control over information, and public awareness of agency actions. Described by Claus Mueller (1973:24)4 as “distortion” because “conditions and policies are quite different from their meanings,” many Lexicon terms constitute a political language that “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (Orwell 1950:92). Another way of viewing this is that “language often masks administrative evil” (Adams and Balfour 1998:15).5 Information Terms as Bureaucratic Vocabulary: A Review Robert P. Watson (1998:389) observes “despite the widespread use of bureaucratese, there has been insufficient research devoted to the study of the language of bureaucracy, and 3 Deborah Tannen (1998: 14) cites Dwight Bolinger’s work in making the point that “language is like a loaded gun.” Tannen observes the “terms in which we talk about something shape the way we think about it – even what we see.” 4 Mueller powerfully illustrates his concept of distortion by offering examples of “reformulated language,” from the Meyers Lexicon published in the Weimar Republic in 1924, under National Socialist Germany in 1936, as Language Regulations issued by the Office of the Press (Reichspressant). 5 For example, the Central Intelligence Agency’s term “extraordinary rendition,” is a term that masks the chilling dimensions of “outsourcing” torture and human rights violations. 3 Maret | On Their Own Terms little is known about its effect.” Srikant Sarangi and Stefan Slembrouck (1996:7) go further, questioning if the language of bureaucracy is a [sic specialized] language used in bureaucratic settings, or if is it language used in a particular way. In response to Watson, Sarangi and Slembrouck, I pose that Lexicon terms comprise a specialized, evolving language that is created and employed across bureaucratic6 settings by federal agencies, which should really be thought of as “information societies.”7 With origins in law, regulation, territory, customary practices (relics or habits8), power, “hidden arrangements” (Sjoberg, Vaughn and Williams, 1984:446), and rational legal authority, these terms communicate and direct government policy across agencies, to the Congress, and the public. The terms listed in this work, which form the “language of bureaucracy,” permeate every aspect of the federal information system. At times, this system affronts citizen and congressional understanding of federal information practices, and has serious consequences for what James Russell Wiggens has outlined as the right-to- know. 9 A review of sociological, legal, and political science literature is helpful in positioning the problem of language in bureaucracy as a critical research problem: 6 Bureaucracy as used in this work follows Max Weber’s (1958: 196-198) description of “ideal” bureaucracy. That is, activity, authority, and the fulfillment of duties are distributed in a fixed way to constitute bureaucratic authority. This system is found in all bureaucratic structures as well as large party organizations and in management of the modern office, or bureau, which is based upon