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By: Aimen Taimur
Within contemporary military thinking, a civilian's capacity to interpret events and make decisions increasingly attracts strategic attention. In its account of cognitive warfare, NATO describes it as activities intended to secure cognitive advantage through military and/ or non-military means. Although its Chief Scientist’s report treats cognition as a cross-cutting dimension rather than a separate operational domain, it explicitly recognises civilian exposure and operations below the threshold of armed conflict. By targeting how citizens form and revise their judgements, these operations may interfere with freedom of thought and freedom of opinion. This raises the question of what duty states owe citizens in protecting the exercise of these rights against foreign cognitive interference.
An asymmetry beyond individual resistance
Across the information environment, operations can obscure both their organisation and their purpose. In its investigation of Portal Kombat, France's foreign interference monitoring service identified 193 websites disseminating pro-Russian material, using automated distribution and search optimisation to reach international audiences. Through the GLASSBRIDGE investigation, researchers documented commercial networks circulating pro-China content through websites resembling independent news outlets. These investigations establish infrastructures of influence, while leaving their effects on individual thinking harder to ascertain.
As the GLASSBRIDGE investigation documents, websites masquerading as local news outlets combined copied reporting with pro-China narratives, concealing the provenance of material presented to readers. Through this manufactured appearance of independent journalism, the operation appropriates the credibility citizens rely on when evaluating information. The connection to freedom of thought and opinion lies in this deliberate distortion of the basis on which judgement is formed. Concealed coordination deprives citizens of information needed to assess the source's interests and weigh its claims for themselves.
For the individual encountering such material, the apparent independence of different sources can conceal a common origin. Even careful scrutiny may fail to expose the coordination behind them. With access to funding, technical infrastructure and audience data, operators can repeatedly adjust their methods; the reader generally sees only the resulting content. Within this asymmetry, advice to become more discerning offers an incomplete response. Establishing an operation's provenance may require evidence held by platforms, cross-border investigation and sustained technical expertise. Therefore, protection depends on capacities unavailable to individuals, so the state's responsibility becomes difficult to evade.
From information targeting to cognitive targeting
Through artificial intelligence, this asymmetry can become more personalised. The GoLaxy documents, released through a university research archive, describe a Chinese state-aligned firm's data harvesting, profiling and AI-driven propaganda. Their significance lies in the integration of information about audiences with systems designed to influence them.
Alongside these practices, neurotechnology introduces potential access to physiological indicators of vulnerability. As analysis of consumer brain-computer interfaces explains, measurements associated with fatigue or attention could refine the timing and delivery of influence. The scenario remains prospective, and such devices have limited capabilities. Nevertheless, it identifies a plausible connection between extracting neural information and exploiting the circumstances in which judgement is exercised.
Against this background, references to China's “brain warfare” ambitions require serious scrutiny. In official testimony, the US Commerce Department reported restrictions on Chinese military medical institutions over biotechnology supporting military uses, including purported brain-control weaponry. This establishes an official allegation, with no demonstration here of operational mind-control capabilities. Indeed, sceptical scholarship on cognitive warfare challenges its strategic coherence and assumptions about cognition and emotion. For legal analysis, this scepticism is useful. A protective obligation must rest on identifiable practices and credible risks, without assuming that audiences are programmable or that exposure proves successful manipulation.
Giving freedom of thought a protective reading
Through research on cognitive freedom and manipulative AI, freedom of thought emerges as a basis for examining interference with the formation of thought. Applied here, the central concern is the deliberate exploitation of vulnerabilities to undermine independent judgement. Establishing that concern legally requires more than identifying misleading content or an intention to persuade. Relevant evidence would include the methods employed, their intrusiveness and the vulnerability exploited.
Under Article 18 ICCPR, freedom of thought encompasses thought on all matters, as clarified in General Comment No. 22, paragraphs 1 and 3. Alongside this protection, Article 19(1) guarantees the freedom to hold opinions without interference. In General Comment No. 34, paragraphs 9 and 10, the Human Rights Committee confirms that this freedom includes changing opinions freely and prohibits efforts to coerce their adoption or abandonment. Although Article 19(1) is absent from Article 4's list of non-derogable rights, paragraph 5 explains that derogation from freedom of opinion can never be necessary during an emergency. Together, these provisions support examining cognitive operations through their interference with free thought and opinion. Applying them to concealed, technologically mediated manipulation requires establishing how the methods employed compromise the freedom they protect.
It can be argued that, read together with Article 2's obligation to ensure Covenant rights, these protections provide a foundation for protective action. In General Comment No. 31, paragraph 8, the Human Rights Committee recognises duties of due diligence against certain interferences by private persons or entities. This is largely relevant where commercial intermediaries enable hostile operations. Within Europe, Article 9 ECHR's positive obligations create a complementary starting point. Much of the jurisprudence concerns religious freedom, however, so its application to cognitive interference requires reasoned development. Across both systems, a specific duty to protect against foreign cognitive operations remains an interpretative claim. The general obligation to secure rights supplies its foundation; the practices described above give that obligation a contemporary problem to address.
For citizens within a state's jurisdiction, reasonable protection could encompass regulation of enabling infrastructure and investigation of credible threats. The receiving state's responsibility for its own omissions must be assessed separately from the foreign state's responsibility for conducting an operation. Uncertainty over sponsorship should still permit proportionate protective action where the harmful mechanism is sufficiently evidenced.
What reasonable protection should require
In the context of foreign information manipulation and interference, a basis for protective action may appear in General Comment No. 34, paragraph 7, which requires states to protect freedom of opinion and expression against certain interferences by private persons or entities. Where commercial intermediaries enable foreign operations, this obligation supports protective measures within the receiving state's jurisdiction. The safeguards proposed below apply that principle to practices that facilitate cognitive interference.
At the preventive level, states should examine whether existing safeguards adequately constrain the collection and use of neural or behavioural data (as modelled by various US states), for exploitative targeting. Through oversight of services within their jurisdiction, they could require appropriate security and scrutinise practices that expose users to serious cognitive interference. Where credible evidence indicates an ongoing operation, investigative duties should include preserving evidence and enabling independent scrutiny. Access to relevant platform records may be essential, subject to privacy safeguards. For affected individuals, accessible complaints procedures and effective remedies would make protection more than a security objective.
For such protection to work, the timing is crucial because by the time an individual can explain how an operation affected their thinking, the infrastructure behind it may have disappeared, leaving them to prove an interference whose concealment was part of its design. A duty calibrated to this asymmetry should allow credible evidence of exploitative methods to trigger investigation before a demonstrable change in belief occurs. Otherwise, the difficulty of establishing cognitive harm becomes a practical advantage for those engineering it.
Throughout these responses to cognitive warfare, freedom of expression and privacy remain binding constraints. Broad powers to suppress allegedly hostile narratives could entrench government control over public debate. Any restrictive measure therefore needs a clear legal basis, evidence supporting its necessity and independent review. Ultimately, the asymmetry that makes cognitive operations difficult to resist also explains why protection cannot be delegated entirely to civilians. Through freedom of thought, states should be required to justify what they do about credible threats, including failures to act. As military competition reaches further into civilian cognition, the individual's ability to form and reconsider convictions must become an explicit measure of the adequacy of state protection.
Bio
Aimen Taimur is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR), Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, and a licensed human rights lawyer. Her research examines the protection of cognitive freedom against AI-driven manipulation and the implications of emerging technologies for human rights.