Rhetoric of InSecurity: The Language of Danger, Fear and Safety in National and International Contexts

This book demands that we question what we are told about security, using tools we have had for thousands of years.

The work considers the history of security rhetoric in a number of distinct but related contexts, including the United States' security strategy, the "war" on Big Tech, and current concerns such as cybersecurity. Focusing on the language of security discourse, it draws common threads from the ancient world to the present day and the near future. The book grounds recent comparisons of Donald Trump to the Emperor Nero in a linguistic evidence base. It examines the potential impact on society of policy-makers' emphasis on the novelty of cybercrime, their likening of the internet to the Wild West, and their claims that criminals have "gone dark". It questions governments' descriptions of technology companies in words normally reserved for terrorists, and asks who might benefit.

Interdisciplinary in approach, the book builds on existing literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences, most notably studies on rhetoric in Greco-Roman texts, and on the articulation of security concerns in law, international relations, and public policy contexts. It adds value to this body of research by offering new points of comparison, and a fresh but tried and tested way of looking at problems that are often presented as unprecedented. It will be essential to legal and policy practitioners, students of Law, Politics, Media, and Classics, and all those interested in employing critical thinking.

這本書要求我們對於安全性所聽到的事情提出質疑，並使用我們已經擁有數千年的工具。

這本書考慮了安全性修辭在幾個不同但相關的背景下的歷史，包括美國的安全策略、對大型科技公司的「戰爭」，以及當前的議題，如網絡安全。著重於安全性言論的語言，從古代世界到現在和不久的將來，提煉出共同的主題。這本書以語言證據為基礎，將最近將唐納德·特朗普與尼祿皇帝相比的比較融入其中。它檢視了政策制定者對於網絡犯罪的新奇性強調、將互聯網比作西部荒野以及聲稱犯罪分子「變得隱匿」對社會可能產生的影響。它質疑政府將科技公司描述成通常僅用於恐怖分子的詞語，並問誰可能從中受益。

這本書採用跨學科的方法，建立在人文和社會科學領域的現有文獻基礎上，尤其是希臘羅馬文本中的修辭研究，以及法律、國際關係和公共政策背景下的安全性關切的表達。它通過提供新的比較點和一種新鮮但經過驗證的解決問題的方式，為這一研究領域增添了價值，並且經常被呈現為前所未有的問題。這對於法律和政策從業人員、法律、政治、媒體和古典學科的學生以及所有對於運用批判性思維感興趣的人都是必不可少的。

Victoria Baines is Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University's School of Computing. She has held visiting research fellowships at the University of Oxford and lectured at Stanford University. Trained as a Classicist with a specialism in rhetoric in Roman literature, she worked as a law enforcement intelligence analyst and a technology company executive before returning to research. Her research touches on public policy, threat representation, surveillance, cyberspace and internet governance, and futures methods. She regularly contributes to media coverage on the misuse of social and emerging technologies.

Victoria Baines是伯恩茅斯大學計算機學院的訪問研究員。她曾在牛津大學擔任訪問研究員，並在斯坦福大學講授課程。她以古典學家的身份接受訓練，專攻羅馬文學中的修辭學，曾擔任執法情報分析師和科技公司高管，之後回歸研究領域。她的研究涉及公共政策、威脅呈現、監控、網絡空間和互聯網治理以及未來方法。她經常就社交和新興技術的誤用向媒體做出貢獻。