Written Communication Jul 2021

Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance

Calvin Pollak Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2021-07-01
DOI
10.1177/07410883211007870
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
rhetorical criticism discourse analysis voice and style quantitative research
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. Gulbrandsen et al. (2025)
    Legitimation in The Giving Pledge: Constituting a Rhetoric of Wealth
    Written Communication
  2. Pollak et al. (2024)
    Social Justice and “Harmful Tech”: Dis-Orienting Militarized Research
    Technical Communication Quarterly

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