The extrajudicial digital: Disconnection as a legacy of institutional control

Abstract

In May 2010, the U.S. Public Affairs Office of the Joint Task Force of Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) joined many other federal institutions in opening an official Twitter account (@JTFGTMO), but by May 2019, it was gone; the account, deactivated. This research builds upon the premise that carceral authority is exerted not only through speech itself but also erasure, which can decentralize the networked power of government spokespeople. This article importantly advances a method for procuring social media data by decentering corporate regimes of records management and focusing on the archival potential of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a way of studying disconnective practices of the U.S. national security state. Drawing on a multimodal corpus of archived deleted tweets, internal administrative records, and a FOIA response letter, the article traces disconnection as a staged institutional process rather than a single act of withdrawal. This empirical approach garners an analysis of how the JTF-GTMO steadily attempted to sever much of its networked communication, initially through deletion of individually published messages and later through the total deactivation of its Twitter and Facebook accounts. The study ultimately contributes to ongoing research on national security, public memory, and platform power by proposing a counter-archival method that can be adapted across a number of jurisdictions.