Towards a critique of state secrecy: Uncovering the rhetorical practices of secret keepers and their legitimization by the discourse of law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the rhetorical devices that secret keepers in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States use to justify the non-disclosure of state secrets.It also examines the manner in which judges in these three countries write and speak about state secrets.By embracing the rhetorical devices used by secret keepers and materializing them in reported decisions, judges add legitimacy to the discourse of secret keepers and directly assist in its reproduction and distribution.Taken together, the discourse of the state and the discourse of law on state secrecy sets up the dominant interpretive frames with which any public engagement, whether supportive or critical, must engage.While the persuasive social effect and perceived legitimacy of this combined discourse may ebb and flow, it appears enduring and difficult to challenge despite the existence of counterdiscourses and concessions such as the adoption of access to information legislation.This thesis seeks to understand how state secrecy discourse becomes or appears preeminent, and how it reproduces itself, as a first step in formulating a fuller critique of this discourse.Four chapters in this thesis are based on early drafts that were subsequently expanded and extensively revised.An early version of chapter two, "State Secrecy: A Litterature Review," appeared in (2021) 2:2 Secrecy and Society; an early version of chapter three, "A Brief Genealogy of State Secrecy," appeared in (2013) 31:1 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice; an early version of chapter four, " Why Are State Secrets Protected from Disclosure?The Discourse of Secret Keepers," appeared in (2018) 20:3 The International Journal of Intelligence, Security, and Public Affairs; a subsequent version of chapter four, "The Rhetorical Devices of the Keepers of State Secrets," appeared in (2021) 2:2 Secrecy and Society; and an early version of chapter five, "What Do Judges Say on the Protection of Intelligence Secrets?," appeared in (2019) 34:1 Intelligence and National Security.I am grateful to each publisher for allowing the use of this material in this thesis, and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".