The Invisible Frontline: Women Journalists Under Surveillance

From Pegasus to Pattern Recognition

Investigations by Amnesty International and The Guardian confirm that Pegasus-grade spyware has resurfaced through domestic vendors operating under new names. At least two female journalists in Spain and Hungary were targeted between 2023 and 2024, according to Amnesty’s technical lab.

These tools scrape social networks, messages, and location data. Combined with AI-driven “sentiment analysis,” they build risk profiles used by both state agencies and private contractors. The same algorithms once marketed for counter-terrorism are now used to profile journalists as potential instability risks, according to digital rights researchers.

Digital Harassment as Information Warfare

Beyond surveillance, harassment has become industrial. Coordinated troll farms exploit recommendation systems, flooding timelines with doctored images and sexualized threats. Meta, X, and TikTok claim to strengthen moderation, but classifiers still miss gender-coded abuse. Research from the Reuters Institute shows women journalists receive over three times more online attacks than male colleagues on equivalent beats.

Law, Loopholes, and the Ethics Vacuum

The EU AI Act lists biometric and predictive policing systems as “high-risk” under Article 6 and prohibits certain uses under Article 5. Yet the Act’s national-security exemption lets domestic services bypass oversight entirely. That gap allows AI monitoring to proceed in secret — a legal shadow zone between protection and persecution.

Digital rights groups such as European Digital Rights (EDRi) argue that without mandatory audit trails and external ethics boards, accountability remains performative. As one analyst put it: “You can’t fix systemic bias with quarterly reporting.”