Amnesty says Morocco used spyware and bugs to track critics

Amnesty International has accused Morocco of running a surveillance operation broad enough to make privacy look like an administrative inconvenience. In a report published on Thursday, the organisation said the country’s domestic intelligence service used Pegasus spyware, hidden microphones and pre-infected phones to monitor journalists, activists and human rights defenders.

The report, Inside Morocco’s surveillance machine, is based on testimony from a former employee of the Moroccan domestic intelligence service, the DGST, together with leaked documents and journalistic investigations. Amnesty says the agency was responsible for deploying Pegasus in Morocco and used it against activists and journalists between 2017 and 2021. It also says Moroccan authorities combined high-tech tools with older methods such as tailing and wiretapping.

According to the report, the surveillance was not limited to phones. People were secretly videoed and audio recorded in detention, in offices, in cars and even in bedrooms. Phone calls were systematically recorded and monitored, while shops allegedly sold mobile phones already infected with malware by DGST agents. The whistleblower cited by Amnesty also said internet cafés were infected with remote-controlled spyware and that devices were physically compromised at airports. In one case, microphones were hidden in the light fixtures of journalist Omar Radi’s apartment before his later imprisonment.

Amnesty said it matched 103 Moroccan phone numbers entered into the Pegasus system between September and December 2017 to specific individuals. Of those, 65 belonged to civil society members, including 34 human rights defenders and 22 journalists and media workers. Another 25 were political figures or officials, and five were diplomats or representatives of international organisations. Donncha O Cearbhaill, who heads Amnesty’s Security Lab, said these records show that prominent human rights defenders and journalists were among the first numbers entered into the Pegasus system.

The organisation also said it found evidence of spyware delivered through the state-owned Maroc Telecom network. It said Morocco bought tools from companies based in Israel, the European Union and the United States. Rabat has repeatedly denied using spyware against its citizens. Amnesty said it wrote to Moroccan authorities four weeks before publication and received no response; Al Jazeera said it could not immediately reach Moroccan officials for comment.

The report fits a pattern that has been building for years. NGOs, including Amnesty, have long accused Morocco of using Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli NSO Group, to monitor journalists, activists and political figures. Amnesty’s secretary-general, Agnes Callamard, said Morocco had fully embraced techno-authoritarian practices.

The practical result, if the report is correct, is bleakly familiar: surveillance not as a narrow security tool, but as a way to pressure critics and shape public debate. Amnesty says the personal data collected on activists and human rights defenders was used to fuel public smear campaigns against them. It is a tidy arrangement for power, less so for anyone who still believes that a government’s first instinct should be restraint.

Amnesty called on Morocco to end the surveillance and urged states to halt spyware exports to the country until human rights safeguards are in place. The investigation was carried out with 14 media organisations coordinated by Forbidden Stories.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com