ABSTRACTThis study examines technological research in higher education as a social justice issue. Focusing on technologies developed for war, surveillance, and policing at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), we compare institutional and activist discourses about these projects, uncovering significant differences in accommodation strategies and values-based arguments. We conclude that locally situated controversies such as this one might value not only for social justice research, but also in providing pedagogical and theoretical scaffolding toward real local change.KEYWORDS: Social justice / ethicsscience communication / environmental communicationdigital technologies / emerging technologiestextual analysis / linguistic analysis AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank Alex Helberg and Laxman Singanamala, who each provided helpful feedback on drafts of this work. They are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to editors Rebecca Walton and Tracy Bridgeford for their useful comments and suggestions. In addition, they wish to thank their former colleagues and comrades at Carnegie Mellon University, who inspired many aspects of this project: particularly the members of CMU Against ICE who authored the Dis-Orientation Guide. Finally, they give special thanks to Alaina Foust and Gunjan, Manish, Siddhant, and Daksh Bhardwaj for their advice and support.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsCalvin PollakCalvin Pollak is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Technical Communication & Rhetoric at Utah State University, where he teaches courses on research methods and professional editing. His scholarly interests include institutional rhetoric, language accessibility, and social justice. He is also co-founder, co-producer, and co-host of re:verb, a podcast about language in action.Sanvi BhardwajSanvi Bhardwaj is a junior at Cornell University studying Health Care Policy and Inequality Studies. Her scholarly interests include social justice, health disparities among marginalized groups, and community-based healthcare interventions. She is also involved in local activism as a member of Cornell Progressives.

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.