Amnesty International on Thursday reported that a whistleblower inside Morocco’s intelligence service helped reveal a vast surveillance apparatus targeting journalists, activists and dissidents.
Commenting on the increasingly hostile environment for freedom of expression in the country, Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General stated:
Morocco has wholly embraced techno-authoritarian practices, acquiring a wide range of surveillance technologies to establish and enable a repressive system specifically designed to instill fear among human rights activists and journalists, silence their voices and obstruct their work inside and outside Morocco.
The report identified the Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST), as the entity responsible for the deployment of Pegasus spyware in Morocco and confirmed in July 2021 that Moroccan authorities used Pegasus zero-click attacks against Moroccan journalists, activists and human rights defenders.
Amnesty International was able to directly confirm the presence of traces of Pegasus spyware through forensic analysis of numerous devices belonging to people whose numbers were on the list of targeted individuals uncovered in the Pegasus Project and with the assistance of the whistleblower’s testimony over many years.
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