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

Journalists in Pakistan are routinely subject to harassment, arrests and even enforced disappearances. In this backdrop, journalists are also reporting experiencing a high level of surveillance, both online and offline.

Pakistan’s unlawful mass surveillance and censorship expansion is powered by a nexus of companies based in Germany, France, United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Canada, and the United States, Amnesty International said today in a new report “Shadows of Control”. The year-long investigation was carried out in collaboration with Paper Trail Media, DER STANDARD, Follow the Money, The Globe and Mail, Justice For Myanmar, InterSecLab and the Tor Project.

Responding to the publication of a Citizen Lab report identifying Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino and another who has chosen to remain anonymous, as the latest targets of Paragon’s spyware in Europe, Elina Castillo Jiménez, Advocacy and Policy Advisor on targeted surveillance at Amnesty International, said: 

Responding to a ruling that spyware maker NSO Group must pay more than USD167 million in damages to Whatsapp, Rebecca White, Amnesty International’s researcher on targeted surveillance, said:

You can also read a pdf version of this technical briefing.

Two journalists from Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), an award-winning Serbian network of investigative journalists, were targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware last month, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals.  

Novo istraživanje Amnesty International-a otkriva da su dve novinarke iz Balkanske istraživačke mreže (BIRN), nagrađivane mreže istraživačkih novinara iz Srbije, prošlog meseca bile meta špijunskog softvera Pegasus.  

Responding to the publication of a Citizen Lab report identifying multiple cases involving the use of Paragon’s spyware against journalists and human rights defenders in Italy, the Head of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, said:

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.

On 26 February 2025, Amnesty International filed written submissions to the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Krzysztof Brejza v. Poland and 8 Other Applications. The case raises important questions of significance for domestic and regional legal systems around the world grappling with the intersection of human rights and digital surveillance through spyware. Based on its research, Amnesty International submits that, to comply with international and regional human rights law and standards, states should adopt a ban on highly invasive spyware because, as is explained, its technical features render it incompatible with international human rights law and standards.

Responding to Cellebrite’s announcement that it will stop the use of its digital forensic equipment for some of their customers in Serbia, following Amnesty International’s report on the misuse of spyware and mobile forensic products by Serbian authorities to unlawfully target activists and journalists, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, Head of the Security Lab at Amnesty International, said: