Moroccan whistleblower reveals how Rabat used Israel's Pegasus spyware for surveillance
A Moroccan intelligence insider has revealed details about his government’s use of hacking software, including Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware, to track journalists, human right defenders and foreign officials.
The whistleblower's revelations were reported in an investigation published on Thursday by Forbidden Stories, Amnesty and 13 media organisations.
Investigative reporting in 2021 accused Morocco of having used the Israeli-manufactured hacking tool for spying on its critics as well as allies - claims that Rabat denied at the time.
The former Moroccan intelligence officer said he had been witness to much of Morocco's relationship with Pegasus, from its introduction to Moroccan officials to its utilisation.
Safir, the pseudonym given to the whistleblower, worked at the Direction Generale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST), the Moroccan domestic intelligence services, for almost a decade.
His testimonies were corroborated by evidence gathered by the investigative consortium, incuding leaked emails, targeting records relating to Pegasus and other spyware, victims’ testimony and internal training material, as well as leaked data analysed by Amnesty International's Security Lab.
It was in 2017 in a luxurious villa in the capital Rabat that Pegasus was first introduced to the Moroccan intelligence services, according to the investigation.
Representatives from Israel's NSO Group, the cyber-intelligence firm that gave birth to Pegasus, gave an extensive presentation of the spyware to high-ranking Moroccan intelligence officers and technical experts.
The house was called “the FSSYS villa” after the FSSYS Maroc, the Moroccan branch of the Emirati surveillance intermediary al-Fahad.
Safir suggested in the report that the costly Pegasus software was a gift from the UAE.
“Millions for the Emiratis, that’s nothing,” said Safir. “The Emirates bought it and redistributed it to friendly services. You could say it’s like Netflix: a friend pays for the subscription, and the others use their account.”
Due to the high cost, the report notes that the DGST only resorted to Pegasus as a last option, after the exhaustion of cheaper, old-school surveillance techniques.
These included “targeting terminals in internet cafes and even persuading shopkeepers to sell mobiles pre-infected with other spyware to dissidents”, the Guardian reported, drawing on the whistleblower's account.
“We never start with Pegasus,” Safir said. “It’s the monster’s weapon.”
In September 2017, shortly after the villa meeting, the DGST used Pegasus against Moroccan journalists and human rights defenders, according to data leaked in an earlier investigation.
Moroccan dissidents were the first but not only targets. Aminatou Haidar, a prominent human rights activist from Western Sahara, and Igancio Combrero, a Spanish journalist, were among the more than 200 Spanish mobile numbers selected for Pegasus targeting by a user that was believed to be Morocco.
Senior Spanish officials, including the defence minister, Margarita Robles, and the interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, were among the targets of the DGST, the investigation finds.
The investigation revealed that the DGST used Pegasus against Spanish civil guard officers who had travelled to Morocco to share counter-terrorism expertise.
Despite the extra security measures usually taken by Policia Nacional, the Spanish law enforcement agency, when travelling to Morocco, the Guardia Civil officers did not think extra precautions were needed when dealing with an ally.
“We didn’t do it because we didn’t suspect we would be spied on,” a senior Spanish civil guard officer told the consortium.
There were no traces of the Moroccan intelligence’s deployment of Pegasus after late 2021, according to the investigation.
This coincides with the period in which the US placed the NSO Group on its blacklist, reportedly causing Israel’s then defence minister to ban exporting Israeli cyber-technology to a number of countries, including Morocco and the UAE.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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