'We start with the verdict': Amnesty says whistleblower exposes Morocco's surveillance machine

A former officer of Morocco's domestic intelligence service has described, in unusual detail, how the country's surveillance apparatus targeted journalists, activists and lawyers — and Amnesty International says forensic evidence backs him up. The account comes in a new report, "We Start With the Verdict: Inside Morocco's Surveillance Machine", produced with fourteen media organisations and coordinated by Forbidden Stories. Its central witness is "Safir", a former employee of the General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST), who described a system in which digital and physical surveillance fused into a single machine of control. The forensic trail is striking. Amnesty matched 103 Moroccan phone numbers entered into the country's Pegasus system between September and December 2017 to identifiable individuals. Sixty-five were civil society members — 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, five lawyers and four academics. "These records show the phone numbers of prominent human rights defenders and journalists were among the first to be entered into the Pegasus system," said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty's Security Lab, "indicating that this was the priority purpose for which the DGST had acquired the highly invasive spyware system." The report names four cases in detail. Omar Radi, a journalist now based in Germany, was investigating land dispossession when he began noticing the signs — a phone battery draining fast, unexplained heat, a slowing network. Amnesty's Security Lab confirmed in June 2020 that his phone carried Pegasus, the spyware built by Israel's NSO Group. Radi described physical surveillance so brazen it barely hid: "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." The other cases are Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist; Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer; and Hicham Mansouri, a journalist in exile previously jailed on charges Amnesty calls trumped-up. The methods, the report says, went far beyond spyware: calls intercepted, locations tracked, targets secretly filmed in detention, offices, cars and bedrooms. Hidden microphones were implanted in Radi's apartment light fixtures; phone shops were co-opted to sell handsets pre-infected with spyware; private material was then fed to state-aligned media for smear campaigns. Amnesty also points to internal NSO Group materials disclosed in a long-running US court case brought by WhatsApp, which it says show NSO staff training Moroccan authorities — a customer the company internally codenamed "Morgen". Four weeks before publication, Amnesty wrote to the Moroccan authorities. It received no response.