A recent international investigation reveals that Morocco has established an extensive surveillance network using technology from Israeli companies, targeting European officials, journalists, and human rights activists.<\/p>\n
According to the report, which Israeli newspaper Haaretz also participated in, Morocco has been a customer of the Israeli company NSO since at least 2017 and purchased the Pegasus spyware. It is said that this tool was used before the signing of the normalization agreement between the two parties to monitor certain French and Spanish ministers.<\/p>\n
Pegasus allows its users secret access to the full content of the target phone, from reading messages in encrypted apps to remotely activating cameras and microphones covertly.<\/p>\n
The investigation further states that Morocco’s security cooperation with Israeli companies is not limited to Pegasus. Morocco has also used the system from the Israeli company Circles, which exploits gaps in international telecommunications protocols to identify device locations worldwide.<\/p>\n
Internal documents from 2016 obtained by Haaretz reveal negotiations between Morocco and Israeli company Verint to purchase surveillance equipment worth $18 million. In these documents, the code name “Maghazin” is used to refer to Morocco, and projects such as the Skylock mobile phone tracking system and early spyware software EPI are mentioned.<\/p>\n
The investigation also discloses that Morocco has employed tools from the Israeli company Cellebrite, which enables data extraction from confiscated phones. According to a 2019 report by Privacy International, Cellebrite had proposed to Morocco the examination of refugees’ phones at borders. A senior officer of Morocco’s Cybersecurity General Directorate told the investigators that Cellebrite’s tools were used to monitor human rights activists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An international probe reveals Morocco’s use of Israeli spyware technology to target European officials, journalists, and human rights defenders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}