An Amnesty International staff member has been targeted by a sophisticated surveillance campaign, in what the organization suspects was a deliberate attempt to spy on its staff by a government hostile to its work.

A new investigation by Amnesty International’s Security Lab has discovered evidence that the Predator spyware was used in 2024 to target Teixeira Cândido – an Angolan journalist, jurist, press freedom activist, and former Secretary-General of the Syndicate of Angolan Journalists (Sindicato dos Journalists Angolanos). This is the first forensically confirmed case of the Predator spyware being used to target civil society in Angola. 

On 6 August, the Pakistani authorities announced they were shutting down mobile internet services in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province.  

Amnesty International’s Security Lab, in collaboration with Amnesty’s European Regional Office, has uncovered a new case of misuse of a Cellebrite product to break into the phone of a youth activist in Serbia. The attack closely matches the form of attack that we previously documented in a report, ‘A Digital Prison’, published in December 2024. This new case provides further evidence that the authorities in Serbia have continued their campaign of surveillance of civil society in the aftermath of our report, despite widespread calls for reform, from both inside Serbia and beyond, as well as an investigation into the misuse of its product, announced by Cellebrite.

Technical specifications and marketing material from surveillance vendors is often kept secret. The resulting information asymmetry prevents defenders in the cybersecurity industry and at-risk civil society groups from understanding the full scope of threats that they face. The aim of this research is to provide concrete information about surveillance capabilities available from one vendor in the commercial surveillance market. We hope that this report can be a resource for the cybersecurity community and major mobile device and technology vendors.

Amnesty International’s Security Lab is pleased to announce that it is part of the inaugural cohort of groups to be supported by the Spyware Accountability Initiative (SAI), whose mission is to grow a global field of civil society organizations who are advancing threat research, advocacy and accountability to address the use and trade of spyware. 

The increasing number of spyware scandals across Europe and around the world were an alarm bell for Alex, a 31-year-old Romanian activist working at the intersection of human rights, technology and public policy.

The following talk was presented by Donncha Ó Cearbhaill from the Amnesty International Security Lab at the 37c3 Chaos Communications Congress in December 2023.

Ahead of the COP28 climate conference, which begins in Dubai on 30 November, Rebecca White, Campaigner at Amnesty International’s Disrupting Surveillance Team, said:

A new investigation into the global surveillance crisis by the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) media network, with technical assistance from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, today begins to reveal the shocking truth about how far the industry’s tentacles have spread and how ineffective EU regulation has been in controlling it. 

This blog post was written as part of the Digital Forensics Fellowship by one of the 2022-2023 Fellows. 

For many of us, that unsettling feeling of being watched is all too real. After all, we live in a world of mass surveillance, from facial recognition to online tracking – governments and technology companies are harvesting intimate information about billions of people. Targeted surveillance is slightly different. It’s the use of technology to spy on specific people.   Targeted surveillance can include the use of hidden cameras, recording devices, or being physically followed or monitored. Here at Amnesty’s Security Lab, we focus on uncovering targeted digital surveillance including spyware, phishing and other digital attack techniques.   Governments across the world are buying and allowing the sale of advanced highly invasive spyware that can compromise anybody’s digital devices and monitor their activity. These tools are made and sold by private companies who are profiting from human right abuses.   Governments and companies say that these surveillance tools are necessary to target ‘criminals and terrorists’. But in reality, scores of human rights defenders, journalists and many others – including Amnesty International staff members – have instead been unlawfully targeted with spyware.