Speaking at the UN headquarters in New York in January 2025, Salvadoran journalist Julia Gavarrete detailed the personal and professional harm that she and her colleagues experienced after being targeted with highly invasive spyware. “You realize your entire life won’t be the same anymore. Many of us changed the way we communicate via phones, not only with our sources, but with our families. We started being more cautious,” she said.
Rising authoritarianism and reporters’ reliance on digital devices for their work have brought new and evolving forms of repression. Rising numbers of jailed and killed journalists worldwide have been accompanied by proliferating surveillance threats that undermine the work of the press to inform the public and support democracy.
Epistemology, broadly defined as the study of theories of knowledge, can help us comprehend the nature and scope of these harms. In particular, epistemic rights offer a lens through which to enhance our understanding of such assaults on journalists, their implications, and strategies in response. As philosopher Lani Watson underscores, the epistemic rights lens is valuable because it “focuses, magnifies and clarifies the epistemic dimension of real-world issues and events.”
What are epistemic rights?
Watson argues that everyone has epistemic rights, which involve “duties to seek, receive, and impart information, plus the negation of each.” Individuals’ claims and duties in relation to information can vary and may be covered by existing laws, like those governing free speech and privacy. Though not explicitly named, many epistemic rights are also enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements.
“Epistemic rights are rights that address who is entitled to what kind of information,” writes philosopher Mathias Risse. Individuals are “epistemic actors” who are “knowers and knowns” with rights in relation to information, he explains.
Outlined here in brief and simplified terms, epistemic rights offer a focused framework for identifying and connecting nuanced dynamics in our information landscape, where journalists are central actors. As professor Hannu Nieminen notes, these rights have been historically advanced “under banners such as the freedom of the press, communication rights, media education and media literacy, and cultural rights,” but the wider concept “might offer the common ground we lack.” Epistemic rights can help draw links between abuses and harms, improve investigations of authoritarianism, and generally strengthen scrutiny of power in our digital society.
Journalists as epistemic actors
Journalists’ work and their function as part of what philosopher Lisa Herzog calls the “epistemic infrastructure of democracy” are intrinsically connected with their epistemic actorhood. When a journalist is assaulted, arrested, or otherwise intimidated, their capacity to seek, receive, or impart knowledge is hindered, which is a violation of their epistemic rights. Their professional role as a gatherer of information and a producer of knowledge (a knower) is damaged, and their ability to serve the public interest suffers. In this way, attacks on the press can serve as an effort at knowledge control.
Having a public profile (being known) is often part of a journalist’s job, but the ways in which they are known also matter. Abusive surveillance signifies and promotes harmful asymmetries of knowledge and power, which are usefully interrogated through the lens of epistemic rights. The use of spyware against Gavarrete, for example, violated her epistemic right not to be known in an oppressive manner and undermined her ability to seek, receive, or impart knowledge (report the news).
Gavarrete told me that knowing who was responsible for targeting her and what happened to the data they accessed remains central to her vision of justice. “It’s the minimum that you want, and then after all of that, maybe you can expect many other things. For example, that you will regulate all these [spyware] programs,” she said. An ongoing lawsuit against spyware vendor NSO Group filed in the United States by the Knight First Amendment Institute has asked that the company identify the clients that ordered the surveillance of Gavarrete and other Salvadoran journalists, and to delete all information obtained through the attacks, among other forms of relief.
Surveillance similarly affects journalists’ sources as epistemic actors. At his office in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, Spencer Mogapi told me about the rippling damage caused when police accessed details of his phone communications while he worked as a newspaper editor. He said it made him feel “naked” and corroded his relationships with sources. “People who would regularly reach out would get fearful,” Mogapi explained. The threat of surveillance put his sources at risk of being exposed and harmed, causing them to perceive him as a possible conduit for that danger. “It becomes like a cycle. Everybody tries to censor themselves,” he said, adding that the stress contributed to his leaving his job for a career in public relations.
Other journalists have expressed similar concerns about being known in such intrusive ways after authorities seized and searched their phones with digital forensic tools that can access and extract content en masse.
“We stand to gain”
Epistemic rights provide a framework for investigating, identifying, and documenting attacks on the press and their associated harms. Connecting concerns, they can enhance our ability to define, expose, and confront threats to press freedom and democracy.
However, the same dynamics that make journalists significant epistemic actors also afford them power that may be misused. This possibility further underscores the value of the concept of epistemic rights for considering a range of abuses in the realm of information. As Watson writes, “we stand to gain from improved understanding, identification and protection in relation to harms arising in the epistemic domain.”