Morocco's Surveillance Machine: Amnesty Report Details Pegasus Spyware Targeting Journalists

Omar Radi noticed the signs first in small ways. His phone's battery would drain without explanation. The device grew hot in his pocket. The network slowed to a crawl. For two years, from 2018 to 2020, these technical oddities accumulated into something larger—a pattern he could feel but not yet name. Then, in June 2020, Amnesty International's Security Lab examined his phone and confirmed what the physical world had already been telling him: he was a target of Pegasus, the surveillance tool built by Israeli company NSO Group. Radi, a journalist and human rights defender investigating land dispossession in Morocco, had been watched not for a single article but for the work itself.

The surveillance was not subtle. "They came every day to get a daily report from the parking attendants in my street, the shops I used to go to, and my friends," Radi told Al Jazeera. He would sometimes turn around and walk directly toward the people following him, trying to photograph them, but they would scatter and hide their faces. This combination of digital and physical tracking—the drained batteries and the men in the street—formed a single apparatus designed to monitor and intimidate.

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," produced with 14 media organizations and coordinated by Forbidden Stories, an international network of journalists. The other three targets were Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist; Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer; and Hicham Mansouri, a journalist who had been imprisoned in 2015 on charges of adultery and sexual exploitation—charges Amnesty describes as fabricated. The report rests on testimony from a whistleblower using the pseudonym Safir, a former employee of Morocco's General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, or DGST. Amnesty said it corroborated Safir's account through independent sources, technical evidence, and interviews with ten people identified as surveillance targets.

According to Amnesty's analysis, Pegasus operations in Morocco were fully operational by October 2017. Between September and December of that year, 103 Moroccan phone numbers were entered into the targeting system. Of those, 65 were identifiable as civil society members: 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, five lawyers, and four academics. The surveillance was not random. Safir described a coordinated system that combined multiple methods. Phone shops were coopted to sell infected devices to targets. Neighbors of human rights defenders were recruited as informants to file daily reports on their movements. At internet cafes, field agents would identify which locations targets frequented, giving the DGST access to already-infected machines and allowing operators to track calls, read messages, access photographs, and record audio. Targeted individuals were secretly filmed and recorded in detention, offices, cars, cafes, and bedrooms.

The case of activist Fouad Abdelmoumni illustrated the scope of this apparatus. In 2021, he was secretly filmed at home with his fiancée. Based on the recording's angle, Abdelmoumni believed the footage came from a hidden camera in an air-conditioning unit. Safir described the episode as a "textbook case" of a DGST surveillance and cleanup operation designed to leave no trace. For Radi, now based in Germany, the Amnesty report provided clarity about experiences that had felt surreal. "The Amnesty report connected many dots as to what I was living and feeling while I was under tight surveillance," he said. It explained why his police interrogations and trial had been extraordinary, why many of his rights were not respected—because even the judicial police and judges were under monitoring.

Morocco has denied the allegations. In statements issued in 2020 and 2022, Moroccan authorities challenged Amnesty to provide material evidence. Amnesty said it wrote to Moroccan officials four weeks before publishing the latest report and invited them to respond but received no answer. Al Jazeera also sought comment from Moroccan officials without receiving a response by publication time. Moroccan media outlets have challenged the report's conclusions, arguing that the presence of a phone number in Pegasus targeting records does not by itself prove infection or establish who ordered surveillance. They have also noted that Amnesty had not provided the conclusive technical and material evidence authorities had demanded.

Beyond the four named cases, other journalists have described a broader pattern of pressure and intimidation in Morocco. Taoufik Bouachrine, host of the Talk on Politics podcast and one of Morocco's best-known journalists, was not named in Amnesty's report but has experienced the machinery firsthand. In 2018, he was arrested on charges of rape and human trafficking and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He has denied the charges, saying his prosecution was tied to his journalism. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and said he had been subjected to judicial harassment. The European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for his release. He served more than six years before being released under a royal pardon, but by then his newspaper, Akhbar Al-Youm, had already closed after authorities cut off its advertising revenue. Bouachrine described the methods used against journalists in Morocco: fabricating criminal cases involving allegations of sexual misconduct that amount to moral execution in a conservative society; running smear campaigns through armies of online trolls targeting journalists and their families; and slowly starving media outlets by cutting advertising revenue. "This is another method of destroying investigative journalism," he said. The surveillance, the arrests, the closed newspapers—they form a single system designed not just to watch but to silence.