Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International have just published a study on Pegasus, a spy malware created by an Israeli company, NSO Group and known since 2016, revealing that human rights activists, journalists and opponents have been spied on thanks to Pegasus on behalf of a dozen states.
This malware has the distinction of being able to offer full access to a smartphone, to follow the position of its owner, access all of the content stored locally and even activate microphone and cameras.
If NSO Group has regularly been accused of playing the game of authoritarian diets, but has always assured that its software was only used to obtain information against criminal or terrorist networks, Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International demonstrate the opposite.
Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International had access to a list, established in 2016, of 50,000 telephone numbers that NSO Group customers had selected for potential surveillance.
According to a survey carried out by 17 editors, this list includes the numbers of at least 180 journalists, 600 politicians, 85 human rights activists or 65 business leaders, reports France 24.
On this list is in particular the number of a Mexican journalist, Cecilio Pineda Birto, shot dead in Guerrero in Mexico, a few weeks after his appearance on this document.
The survey published on Sunday yesterday, there is a long-standing suspicion of suspicions on this Israeli company and reveals, in passing that Mediapart was spied on in 2019-2020 by Morocco thanks to Pegasus.
The Moroccan government immediately reacted, expressing its “great astonishment” of the revelations of the Pegasus project of Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International on Monday on Monday.
In a statement, the government affirms that it categorically rejects and condemns these “false allegations devoid of any foundation, like previous similar allegations of Amnesty International on this subject”.
The Moroccan authorities go further by defying its “accusers” to “provide realistic and scientific evidence which can be the subject of professional, impartial and independent expertise and counter-expertise on the veracity of these allegations”.
But Morocco is far from being an isolated case: Hungary is also an NSO Group client, the government of Viktor Orban used it to spy on journalists hostile to its policy, as well as their spouse. Saudi Arabia, Mexico, India and Azerbaijan are also concerned …
This survey, which undermines the communication of the Israeli company, is added to a study, carried out in 2020 by the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, which had confirmed the presence of the Pegasus software in dozens of employees of the Al-Jazira chain in Qatar.
