Amnesty Accuses Morocco of Using Spyware, Surveillance to Silence Journalists

Rabat, Morocco – "I wasn't being watched because of any single article. I was investigating land grabs in Morocco. Then I found out I was a Pegasus target," journalist and human rights defender Omar Radi told Al Jazeera, referring to the mobile surveillance tool developed by Israel's NSO Group.

The discovery came in June 2020, when Amnesty International's Security Lab examined Radi's phone. Radi, who now lives in Germany, said that over the two years from 2018 to 2020 he noticed a series of anomalies: his phone battery draining fast, the device overheating, and his network slowing down.

According to Radi, the physical surveillance was barely discreet. "They came every day to collect reports from the parking attendants on the street, from the shops I frequented, and from my friends. Sometimes I turned around and walked toward the people following me to take their picture, but they ran off quickly and covered their faces," he said.

Radi's case is one of four detailed in a new Amnesty International report titled We Start With the Verdict: Inside Morocco's Surveillance Machine. The report was produced with 14 media organizations and coordinated by the international journalist network Forbidden Stories.

The other three cases are Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist; Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer; and Hicham Mansouri, an exiled journalist jailed in 2015 on adultery and sexual exploitation charges that Amnesty describes as fabricated.

The report draws on interviews with a whistleblower using the pseudonym Safir, a former employee of Morocco's Directorate General for Territorial Surveillance (DGST). Amnesty said it corroborated key parts of Safir's account using independent sources, technical evidence, and interviews with 10 people identified as surveillance targets, including Radi.

"Amnesty's report connected many of the traces of what I went through and felt while under close surveillance. It explains the oddities in my police interrogations and my trial, where many of my rights were not respected, because even judicial police and judges were under surveillance," Radi said.

Amnesty identified the DGST as the agency behind the deployment of Pegasus spyware in Morocco and documented what it described as abuse of the tool against activists and journalists between 2017 and 2021.

Morocco denies the accusations

Morocco has previously rejected Amnesty's allegations that its authorities used Pegasus to target journalists, activists and other critics.

In statements in 2020 and 2022, Moroccan authorities challenged Amnesty to produce material evidence supporting the allegations. Amnesty said it wrote to Moroccan authorities four weeks before publishing the new report and invited them to respond, but received no reply.

Al Jazeera also sought comment from Moroccan officials but had received no response by the time of publication.

Moroccan media have also pushed back on the new report. Le360 argued that the appearance of certain phone numbers in Pegasus target lists does not in itself prove that a device was infected or identify who ordered an attack. The outlet also said Amnesty had not provided the convincing technical and material evidence Moroccan authorities have demanded.

According to the report, Morocco's Pegasus campaigns were fully operational by October 2017, with the case of human rights lawyer El Bouchattaoui as an example: his number was entered into the system in September 2017 and selected as a target weeks before he received an infection link via text message.

Amnesty said its analysis of Pegasus records matched 103 Moroccan phone numbers to individuals identified as potential targets between September and December 2017. Of those, 65 were identified as civil society members, including 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, 5 lawyers and 4 academics.

According to Amnesty, Safir described a surveillance machine that combined digital and physical methods. Targets were secretly filmed and recorded in detention centers, offices, cars, cafes and even bedrooms.

He also said phone shops were induced to sell spyware-infected devices to targets. Neighbors of human rights defenders were recruited as informants to file daily reports on their activities.

Safir also described the use of remote control systems (RCS) at internet cafes. Field officers would identify which cafe a target was visiting, allowing the DGST to access activity on an infected machine, monitor calls, read messages, access photos and record audio.

The report says similar tactics were used against activist Abdelmoumni, who was secretly filmed at home with his fiancee in 2021. Abdelmoumni said he believed the footage was shot with a hidden camera inside an air conditioner, based on the angle. Safir described the case as a "textbook" example of a surveillance and cover-up operation carried out by the DGST.

Journalist describes pressure and threats

Taoufik Bouachrine, one of Morocco's best-known journalists and host of the podcast Talk on Politics, is not named in Amnesty's report but described a similar pattern.

"In Morocco, as in every Arab country, creative methods are used to silence journalists and stop them from doing investigative reporting, especially when the issue involves the unlawful exercise of power, financial corruption and the intertwining of political power with money," he told Al Jazeera.

According to him, the first method is fabricating criminal cases against journalists, "often involving accusations of sexual misconduct in a conservative society, aimed at carrying out a moral execution of a journalist." The second is a smear campaign waged by troll armies and online operatives, targeting journalists and their families.

Bouachrine, 57, was arrested in 2018 on rape and human trafficking charges and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He denies the charges and says his prosecution was tied to his journalism.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Bouachrine's detention was arbitrary and that he had been subjected to judicial harassment. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for his release along with other journalists tried on similar charges.

He served more than six years before being released under a royal pardon. By then, Akhbar Al-Youm, the newspaper he founded, had closed. Bouachrine says the authorities cut off its advertising revenue. "This is another method for destroying investigative journalism: turn off the advertising tap and let the newspaper die slowly," he added.