Ex-security agent provides rare first-hand insight into how Morocco surveillance system works from the inside.
Targets secretly recorded in detention, offices, homes, cars and airports
Intelligence services conspired with phone shop owners to sell phones pre-infected with spyware
Authorities in Morocco operate an expansive and vast surveillance apparatus that combines digital and analogue tools to track, monitor and ultimately silence journalists, activists and other critical voices, Amnesty International said in a new report.
We start with the verdict: Inside Morocco’s surveillance machine
reveals
how Moroccan authorities use unlawful surveillance to target human rights defenders, journalists and other dissenting voices and subject them to criminal prosecutions,
judicial harassment
and other forms of repression in violation of their rights to privacy, liberty, and freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.
“Morocco has wholly embraced techno-authoritarian practices, acquiring a wide range of surveillance technologies to establish and enable a repressive system specifically designed to instill fear among human rights activists and journalists, silence their voices and obstruct their work inside and outside Morocco,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
Morocco has repeatedly
denied using spyware
to spy on its citizens. However, new evidence obtained by Amnesty International including whistleblower testimony, leaked surveillance data, government spyware targeting records and material from companies selling surveillance tools proves the opposite. Drawing on this evidence, the organization documents not only the range of tools and techniques used to target dissent, but the web of international vendors providing them.
“Our report provides the most detailed picture to date of the tools deployed by the Moroccan authorities, such as high-tech spyware, audio bugging systems and trackers t
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