Amnesty alleges Moroccan surveillance targeted journalists and activists

Amnesty International has accused Morocco of operating a surveillance system that allegedly targeted journalists, activists and lawyers, including through Pegasus spyware.

The allegations are contained in a report titled We Start With the Verdict: Inside Morocco’s Surveillance Machine. The investigation was produced with 14 media organisations and coordinated by Forbidden Stories, an international network of journalists.

Amnesty said the report examines alleged surveillance operations carried out between 2017 and 2021. It said key elements of testimony from a whistleblower, known by the pseudonym Safir, were checked against independent sources, technical evidence and interviews with 10 people identified as surveillance targets.

Alleged Pegasus operations

According to Amnesty, Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, or DGST, was behind the deployment of Pegasus in the country. The organisation said its findings documented alleged abuses of the spyware against activists and journalists during the four-year period.

Amnesty said Morocco’s Pegasus operations were fully active by October 2017. Its analysis identified 103 Moroccan phone numbers as potential targets between September and December of that year. Of those, 65 were identifiable members of civil society, including 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, five lawyers and four academics.

The presence of a number in Pegasus targeting records does not by itself prove that a device was infected or establish who ordered an alleged attack. Moroccan media outlet Le360 cited those points while disputing aspects of the report.

Moroccan authorities have previously rejected allegations that Pegasus was used against journalists, activists and other critics. In statements issued in 2020 and 2022, authorities challenged Amnesty to provide material evidence. Amnesty said it wrote to the authorities four weeks before publishing the latest report but received no response. There was also no response to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Accounts from alleged targets

Omar Radi, a journalist and human rights defender now based in Germany, said he noticed possible signs of surveillance between 2018 and 2020, including rapid battery drain, a warmer phone and slower network performance. Amnesty International Security Lab examined his phone in June 2020, after which Radi said he learned that it had been identified as a Pegasus target.

“I was surveilled not because of a specific article. I was investigating land dispossession in Morocco. I then learned I was a Pegasus target,” Radi said.

Radi also described alleged physical monitoring, saying people collected information from parking attendants, shops and his acquaintances. He said he sometimes approached people he believed were following him, but that they hid their faces and ran away.

Safir, described by Amnesty as a former DGST employee, alleged that surveillance combined digital tools with physical monitoring. Safir said people were secretly filmed or recorded in locations including detention facilities, offices, cars, cafes and bedrooms. The former employee also alleged that some phone shops were encouraged to sell spyware-infected devices and that neighbours of human rights defenders were recruited as informants.

Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist, said he believed footage of himself and his fiancée in 2021 had been captured by a hidden camera installed in an air-conditioning unit. Amnesty also detailed cases involving lawyer Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui and journalist Hicham Mansouri.

Pressure on media organisations

Journalist Taoufik Bouachrine, who founded the newspaper Akhbar Al-Youm, said authorities cut off the publication’s advertising revenue. He described criminal cases, online smear campaigns and financial pressure as methods used to weaken investigative journalism.

Bouachrine was arrested in 2018 on charges of rape and human trafficking, which he denied. He received a 15-year prison sentence and served more than six years before being released under a royal pardon. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and said he had faced judicial harassment. The European Parliament also adopted a resolution calling for his release and that of other journalists tried on similar charges.

Amnesty’s allegations remain disputed. Moroccan authorities have rejected earlier claims, while Le360 has questioned what Pegasus records can demonstrate. The latest report nevertheless adds testimony, technical analysis and accounts from alleged targets to the continuing debate over surveillance and press freedom in Morocco.