Rhetorical Accessibility as Political Legitimacy: The Role of Style in NSA Surveillance Discourse

Abstract

This paper develops a theory of language accessibility as crucial to political legitimacy. Focusing in particular on the specialized writing styles employed in leaked US government surveillance documents, I analyze two prominent policy advocacy organizations’ online writing before and after the 2013 National Security Agency leaks to understand the shifting accessibility of their language styles, and how these changes altered the inclusiveness of ensuing debates. Crucially, the NSA documents themselves provide evidence of surveillance policies potentially affecting billions of technology users: immeasurably diverse in their abilities, identities, ages, technical literacies, and linguistic backgrounds. Noting that public policy advocates are also technical communicators, I argue for a renewed ethical responsibility to communicate complex policy information in accessible styles, genres, and media, and I propose that accessibility is a positive normative value bearing significantly upon legitimacy.