CYBER ESPIONAGE, EPISTEMIC ASYMMETRY, AND THE REORIENTATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Abstract

This article reframes cyber espionage as epistemic coercion: the anticipatory impairment of a state’s capacity to know, reason, and decide on its own terms. Using Timor-Leste v. Australia as a point of departure, it shows that the decisive injury in contemporary operations is not destruction or territorial violation, but the conditioning of judgment through persistent access, surveillance, modeling, and infrastructural dependence. The result is cognitive displacement, where sovereign choices appear autonomous yet carry the imprint of external informational design.