Introduction to Special Issue: Technical Communication In/Against Security Logics

This special issue investigates the ways technical communicators employ methods, cultural frameworks, and discourses that depend on the invocation of threats to rationalize policies and procedures. These rationalizations—deployed to manage, diminish, or respond to both real and perceived dangers—are known as “security logics.” Today, such logics are utilized to support institutional and organizational decisions surrounding areas such as immigration, healthcare, law enforcement, national and international security, climate policy, reproductive autonomy, surveillance and privacy, elections, and disaster response. Although framed in the language of safety, these policies often lead to the restriction of civil freedoms, infringement of human rights, and reinforcement of systemic racial and economic disparities. Technical communicators—and the genres they operate within, such as manuals, data visualizations, reports, user experience/user interface (UX/UI) design, proposals, translations, and instructions—frequently serve as vehicles for these logics. In this way, the emphasis on safety and functionality within the field of technical communication may inherently support repressive (alongside protective) modes of securitization. This issue aims to confront how technical communication enables state, corporate, and institutional security initiatives, while also exploring how ethical approaches within the discipline can challenge dominant security narratives to foster greater justice.

Though security is often associated with protecting against threats, the term security logics refers to rhetorical and discursive practices that present and define threats—and thereby legitimize organizational and institutional actions in response. Scholars working within critical security studies examine these logics using tools such as rhetorical analysis, ethnography, and actor–network theory to understand how cultural narratives and justifications influence behavior at all levels (Anwar et al., 2020; Macías-Rojas, 2018; Salter & Mutlu, 2013). Wrange (2022, p. 577) describes security logics as a set of discursive interactions that shape identity, governance, and perceptions of threat, while Stępka (2022, p. 34) defines them as intersubjective meaning-making practices that activate a particular security mindset and influence how problems and their solutions are understood. In this context, technical communication becomes a medium through which threat perceptions and responses are made tangible via the rhetoric, imagery, and design choices that carry both symbolic and functional weight.

Securitization theory was not merely intended to describe security practices, but also to reflect on their political and ethical implications, particularly how “security” is enacted and for whose benefit (Berling et al., 2022). Accordingly, technical communication can meaningfully contribute to security studies by treating security not only as political rhetoric, but as technical labor with real-world impact. Longo (2000) notes that technical writing standards can foster surveillance-like cultures in workplaces, while Scott (2003) shows how health technologies and discourses can monitor marginalized populations. In contrast, Ding (2009) illustrates how informal risk communication during the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak revealed new ethical possibilities within the discipline. So far, technical communication scholars have addressed security logics mainly indirectly, through related areas such as ethics, crisis and risk communication, surveillance, and tactical communication.

Ethical concerns explore how rhetoric and documentation affect decisions and outcomes in security contexts. Katz (1992) critiqued Nazi-era technical texts for their “ethic of expediency,” a critique later extended by Stanchevici (2013) to Soviet intelligence documents. Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson (2019) analyzed the relationship between digital rhetoric and securitization in post-9/11 America. Risk and crisis communication further reveal the tension between public accountability and messaging efficacy. Scott (2003) identified harm caused by HIV risk communication, for example, while Youngblood (2012) examined the friction between transparency and safety in local emergency planning. More recently, Young (2021) assessed how flaws in Zoom's UX design contributed to a data privacy failure during COVID-19. In the realm of surveillance, technical communicators may unintentionally support monitoring practices. Young (2023) highlighted the imperialist themes embedded in national security discourse, and Pflugfelder and Reeves (2024) linked surveillance to teaching strategies within artificial intelligence (AI) pedagogy. Finally, tactical technical communication offers resistance to dominant security paradigms: Randall (2022) calls for anti-utilitarian approaches, and Aguilar (2022) highlights marginalized communities’ use of indirect communication as resistance.

As the scope of security logics continues to broaden—particularly across technology, privacy, surveillance, and data use—so does the role of technical communication in these practices. This special issue invites scholars, educators, and practitioners: to critique and revise professional codes and ethical frameworks; to develop strategies for evaluating security practices; to design communication efforts that are both effective and humane during crises; and to better prepare students and colleagues to critically assess the impact of their work in relation to security logics. The goal is to promote a technical communication practice that not only recognizes its complicity in securitization but also seeks out ways to resist and reimagine it toward more equitable outcomes.

My own interest in security logics began in the realm of risk. As a graduate research associate at a large U.S. insurance firm, I wrote documentation for actuarial and investment models meant to protect funds in the event of large losses. In producing such work, I observed that both the risk models and their documentation are always incomplete (i.e., insecure), because there is always an aspect of reality and of future events that analysis cannot capture. Additionally, many of the models relied on financial securitization instruments that are themselves risky. This realization coincided with my research into housing—research that examined technical communication's role in the legitimation of risky mortgage-backed securities that led to the Global Financial Crisis. Later, in a different role at a regional bank, I wrote mortgage policies and procedures. At each of these positions, I perceived a taken-for-grantedness regarding two consequential frameworks embedded in the industry: (1) the incompleteness of risk management theories and (2) the economic and social inequality perpetuated by the instrumentalizations of risk and security. Indeed, despite public regulatory efforts, insurance, financial, and housing markets practice racial and sexual discrimination, charging higher rates on inferior products for populations deemed too risky and too insecure (Chibanda, 2022; Gaulding, 1995). As the Global Financial Crisis—its maligned relationships with subprime mortgage loans and bailouts—laid bare, misappropriating risk from institutional decision-makers onto marginalized stakeholders obscures debilitating flaws in the system. As I went about my work documenting financial products, I often questioned technical writers’ abilities and ethical imperative to confront the double-faced logics upon which material advantage and sociopolitical coherence are achieved. Indeed, working as a technical writer in corporate America crystallized a disorienting aletheia—that security for some always results in insecurity for others.

The authors of this special issue demonstrate that corporate America certainly is not the only arena that hosts such a paradoxical conflict, nor is it the only context in which technical writers engage securitization:

In “How Biometrics Travel: Reimagining Opt Out Logics,” Morgan Banville and Kimberlyn R. Harrison articulate how the Transportation Security Administration leverages logics of efficiency, effectiveness, and experience to implement widespread uses of biometric technology, a technology that has been shown to facilitate racial bias and invasive surveillance against travelers. Weaving rhetorical analysis and personal narrative, the authors propose “opt out logics”—a suite of design and discourse methods—that practitioners and educators can implement to protect themselves, their clients, and their students as they move within and beyond the nation's borders.

McKinley Green, in “Trans and Queer Visibility in an Era of Hypersurveillance: A UX Study of University Systems for Sharing Gender Pronouns,” presents the results of a UX study about how students navigate a university's invitations for students to, in essence, institutionalize their gender identities. Green extends prior investigation into the systemic risks associated with marginalized visibility but also critically and methodologically intervenes in said investigations by illuminating the tactical, discursive, and interpersonal expressions of trans and queer resistances, particularly in a university setting.

With “Constructing Transnational Security Logics: The Representation of Mothers and Communities in Global Maternal Health Narratives,” Priyanka Ganguly deploys thematic and genre analyses to interrogate digital “success stories” about mothers in the Global South. These stories, published by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), reflect security logics steeped in crisis, homogenization, and paratextuality. For Ganguly, these narratives and their logics, which emphasize dependency, precipitate ineffective development policy wherein the vulnerable are further marginalized.

In “Agency Between Logics: Data Privacy Tactics and the Power of the Data Protection Office,” Sarah Young and Famke Visser present a professional and disciplinary attunement to the multifaceted and often contradictory duties of data protection officers. Data protection officers are appointed by European Union law to ensure that organizations comply with regulations related to personal data. This regulatory function seemingly creates conflict between the organization and the government, with the technical communicator (i.e., the data protection officer) needing to develop a tactical third space to perform job functions ethically and effectively. Young and Visser further elucidate these conflicts and their redress.

In “Lessons in Security Logics from Cold-War Guatemala,” Brittany Halley and Elizabeth Velasquez transport readers to the intersection of risk, radio, and regime change. To do so, they analyze the Sherwood Tapes, a sizable declassified though no less cryptonymic set of CIA-authored radio broadcasts that set the stage for the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the end of the Guatemalan Revolution. The CIA operation was not only an early instance of multimodality, making coordinated uses of music, transcription, and leaflets in addition to radio broadcasts, but, as Halley and Velasquez contend, the operation also opened early, less explored avenues for the uneasy, colonial relationship between military, government, and technical communication.

The following articles also made valuable contributions to the special issue and are available online due to space constraints in the print edition:

Natasha N. Jones and Donnie Johnson Sackey in “Cop City Counternarratives: Security Logics, Sociotechnical Environments, and Marginalized Communities” proffer a pernicious intimacy between technology and dislocation, design and surveillance, technical communication and racialized state violence. Using Cop City, Atlanta's controversial police training facility, as a case study, Jones and Sackey consider the entrenched narratives that legitimate violence against Black people and Black communities. Specifically, narratives about individual freedom, technology, and inclusive safety lend ideological cause to violently police Blackness in the name of security. Conversely, Black resistance to such narratives initiates an imperative for technical communicators to write against state-sponsored violence in favor of more sustainable environments and communities.

Ryan Cheek, in “Apocalyptic Technical Communication from Clockface to Briefcase: Revealing the Spurious Coin of Nuclear-Security Rhetoric,” analyzes the “normalization of nuclear violence” as exemplified in the Doomsday Clock as well as in the Nuclear Football. For Cheek, the Clock and the Football—two otherwise mundane symbols—function as ideological and communicative interlocutors that downplay the imminent threat of nuclear destruction. To demystify this threat, Cheek advocates a technical communication framework that better publicizes disarmament and nonproliferation.

With “Investigating Cookies Banners and Mitigating Complacent Clicking with Informed-Choice Architecture,” authors Lacy Hope, Joy McMurrin, and Merika Moffat apply a UX framework to evaluate a compilation of cookies, the ubiquitous digital prompts urging users to share data. Taking an ethical stance against uncritical, abusive, and poorly designed cookie prompts, Hope, McMurrin, and Moffat deploy criteria (readability, agency, transparency, and satisfaction) to mitigate negative outcomes like “dark patterns” that imperil user data. The results are several heuristics that designers and technical communicators can implement to better serve users.

Security studies offer a wide range of applications, theories, investigations, and interventions, even when more narrowly examined through a singular disciplinary lens. The breadth of the field ultimately mirrors the sprawling imposition of local, national, and global security apparatuses, which are undergirded by the intense technologization of both everyday life and major institutional agendas. Many critics have raised concerns about the contemporary confluence of technology, such as AI and biometrics, authoritarianism, and eroded boundaries between private and public entities (Bogost & Warzel, 2025; Guerrero, 2025). What has been less discussed, perhaps, and what carries no less urgency to bring to light, remains the role of technical communication in ever-expanding and increasingly weaponized surveillance and security superstructures.

The U.S. Department of Defense has made improving UX within the Pentagon a top priority, underscoring the longstanding link between military and bureaucratic effectiveness and technical communication (Mitchell, 2022; Vincent, 2024). Additionally, as recently as July 2025, for example, the United States Defense Information Systems Agency announced billion-dollar plans to enlist a network of small businesses to supply services in support of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program. Government officials wrote that supportive services “must include technical expertise in cloud engineering, cybersecurity, financial management, program execution support, and technical writing through direct support of system owners and technical experts” (Vincent, 2025). Similarly, in early 2025, the Government Accountability Office identified poor documentation for Coast Guard vulnerability to cyberattacks (Arghire, 2025).

Yet, the government is not the only instance where technical writing supports a security infrastructure. Of course, technical writers support the cybersecurity of countless firms. Two UX/UI designers at Nord Security confirm, for instance, that “UX/UI design…plays an essential role in ensuring that the security features of NordVPN are accessible and user-friendly. This involves designing intuitive interfaces, clear instructions, and helpful features that guide users in managing their security settings” (Jokubaitė, 2023). Meanwhile, LinkedIn has ranked nuclear engineer as one of the fastest growing jobs, with technical writing as among nuclear engineers’ “most common skills” (LinkedInNews, 2025). Technical writers are in high demand for what we offer to big and small actors alike, connected by the exponential nature of technology. Again, though, the U.S. is not the only place suffering from an affliction of security, a pandemic of a different sort.

I interviewed Dr. Jana Wrange, whose 2022 article “Entangled Security Logics” inspired this special issue. Her own research on the revival of European civil defense amid Russian military aggression was initiated when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and European nations felt unprepared to respond to Russian attacks. Wrange, who worked in civil defense, sees an important aspect of security logics being the inevitable ambiguity that arises on two fronts: (1) the strategic ambiguity deployed at the level of institutional discourse and (2) the uncertainty in how practitioners interpret discourse, especially around a thematic experience as subjective as one's security. Thus, security logics refer not just to superstructures but also to how writers, managers, bureaucrats, designers, etc., make sense of ambiguous yet immediate superstructures in their work. In that respect, Wrange points to written documentation as a genre that practitioners continually reference in processes of iterative interpretation. “I think there's also really important individual aspect to it as well that needs to be also taken into consideration if you want to make a case for interpretations or logics in general,” Wrange said in our interview, “because it's their personal logic as well which is representative of the state logic.” With Wrange's perspective in mind, I view this special issue as an opportunity for the field to process its entangled relationship to security and for the individual contributors to showcase their own security logics; and like those practitioners who continually return to documentation to make sense of ambiguous conditions, I hope readers can refer back to this collection for guidance in times of intellectual and critical need. After all, the world is watching and is being watched.