At first Omar Radi had no proof, only symptoms. From 2018 to 2020, he told Al Jazeera, his phone’s battery drained too fast, the handset ran hot and the network slowed. He was investigating land dispossession in Morocco. In June 2020 Amnesty International’s Security Lab examined the device and gave the symptoms a name: Pegasus, the spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group.
“I was surveilled not because of a specific article,” Radi said. “I then learned I was a Pegasus target.”
The watching on the street was not much quieter than the watching inside the phone. “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,” he said. Sometimes he turned and walked toward the men following him to photograph them. They ran, he said, and covered their faces.
Radi now lives in Germany. His case is one of four set out in a new Amnesty report, We Start With the Verdict: Inside Morocco’s Surveillance Machine, which was published on 1 October and produced with 14 media organisations under the coordination of the journalists’ network Forbidden Stories. The other three are the veteran activist Fouad Abdelmoumni, the human rights lawyer Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui and Hicham Mansouri, a journalist now in exile. Mansouri was jailed in 2015 on charges of adultery and sexual exploitation, which Amnesty calls trumped-up.
The man called Safir
The report rests largely on a witness from inside the system: a former employee of the General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, the DGST, who appears under the pseudonym Safir. Amnesty says it checked key parts of his account against independent sources, technical evidence and interviews with 10 people it identifies as surveillance targets, Radi among them. Amnesty names the DGST as the agency that deployed Pegasus in Morocco and documents what it calls abuses of the spyware against activists and journalists between 2017 and 2021.
The title comes from Safir. According to Amnesty’s Security Lab summary, he said the agency does not concern itself with judicial authorisation or warrants, and ended with this:
There’s complete impunity. We start with the verdict.
Read as a reflection, that line describes a whole order of things. In a state that works this way the court does not find the truth. It confirms a conclusion reached somewhere else, earlier, by people who never sign their names. Radi said the report finally explained his own interrogations and trial, where “many of my rights weren’t respected, because even the judicial police and the judges were under monitoring.”
Wires, informants, an air conditioner
The apparatus Safir describes runs on both technology and people. As Amnesty relays his account, targets were secretly filmed and recorded in detention, in offices, in cars, in cafes and in bedrooms. Phone shops were enlisted to sell targets handsets already carrying spyware. Neighbours of human rights defenders were recruited to file daily reports on where they went. At internet cafes, he said, field agents worked out which cafe a target was using, and the DGST, through remote control systems already planted on the machines, could follow calls, read messages, open photographs and record audio.
In 2021 Abdelmoumni was secretly filmed at home with his fiancée. From the angle of the footage, he believes the camera was hidden in an air-conditioning unit. Safir called the episode a “textbook case” of a DGST surveillance and cleanup operation built to leave no trace.
The numbers follow the same pattern. According to the report, Morocco’s Pegasus operation was fully running by October 2017. El Bouchattaoui’s number went into the system in September 2017 and was selected for targeting weeks before an infection link reached him by text message. Amnesty says it matched 103 Moroccan numbers to people identified as potential targets between September and December 2017. Of those, 65 belonged to civil society: 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, five lawyers and four academics. The Security Lab summary adds that forensic work confirmed Maroc Telecom’s network was used to facilitate spyware attacks, and it lists tools from several other vendors beyond NSO.
The denial and the silence
Morocco has rejected such accusations before. In statements in 2020 and 2022 its authorities challenged Amnesty to produce material evidence. This time Amnesty says it wrote to them four weeks before publication and got no answer. Al Jazeera also asked Moroccan officials for comment and had received none when it published.
Moroccan media did answer. Le360 cited arguments that a phone number appearing in Pegasus targeting records does not on its own show that a device was infected or who ordered an attack, and said Amnesty still had not supplied the conclusive technical and material proof the authorities had asked for. Amnesty’s own summary names Le360, with Chouf TV and Barlamane, among the outlets it says ran smear campaigns against targets, often with private or intimate material.
The other instruments
Spyware is one tool among several. Taoufik Bouachrine, one of the country’s best-known journalists and host of the Talk on Politics podcast, does not appear in the report, but he described the same pattern to Al Jazeera. Across the Arab world, he said, “inventive methods” are used to deter investigative reporting, especially on abuse of power, corruption and “the intertwining of political authority and money.”
The first method, in his account, is the invented criminal case, “often involving allegations of sexual misconduct in a conservative society that amount to a journalist’s moral execution.” The second is the smear campaign carried out by armies of online trolls and operatives who go after journalists and their families.
He speaks from experience. Bouachrine, now 57, was arrested in 2018 on charges of rape and human trafficking and sentenced to 15 years. He denies the charges and says he was prosecuted for his journalism. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and said he had faced 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 a royal pardon freed him.
By then his newspaper, Akhbar Al-Youm, had already closed. He says the authorities cut off its advertising. “This is another method of destroying investigative journalism,” he said, “turning off the advertising tap and leaving a newspaper to die slowly.”
Among other measures, Amnesty is asking Morocco to stop surveilling human rights defenders and journalists and to have the DGST independently investigated. It is asking all states to refuse spyware export licences to Morocco. The authorities have not yet replied.