A copy of this report is available for download here.

A new interactive online platform by Forensic Architecture, supported by Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab, maps for the first time the global spread of the notorious spyware Pegasus, made by cyber-surveillance company NSO Group.

Responding to the release of NSO Group’s transparency report, Danna Ingleton, Deputy Director of Amnesty Tech, said: 

South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS) is using abusive surveillance to terrorize journalists, activists and critics, leading to a climate of intense fear and self-censorship, Amnesty International said in a new report.

Your phone rings. Within seconds, it’s infected with secret spyware that’s tracking everything you do. This isn’t a conspiracy theory or a twist in a Netflix thriller. It’s happening right now to people like you – and you have the power to stop it.

Amnesty International has launched a brand new podcast series ‘Witness from Amnesty International’. The series introduces listeners to the organization’s Research and Crisis Response teams – whose investigations take them to some of the most dangerous and volatile places on earth.

FinSpy is a full-fledged surveillance software suite, capable of intercepting communications, accessing private data, and recording audio and video, from the computer or mobile devices it is silently installed on. FinSpy is produced by Munich-based company FinFisher Gmbh and sold to law enforcement and government agencies around the world. According to media reports, when Egyptian protesters broke into the offices of the now dissolved State Security Investigations Service, an intelligence body responsible for investigating security threats and notorious for committing grave human rights violations during Hosni Mubarak’s decades’ long rule, in 2011, they discovered contracts for the sale of FinSpy to Egyptian authorities. Since then, research groups such as Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto, and Privacy International have discovered FinSpy being used to target HRDs and civil society in many countries, including Bahrain, Turkey and Ethiopia. Because of this, Amnesty International’s Security Lab tracks FinSpy usage and development as part of our continuous monitoring of digital threats to HRDs.

A Tel Aviv District Court today rejected an attempt, supported by Amnesty International, which sought to force Israel’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) to revoke the security export license of spyware company NSO Group. 

In October 2019 Amnesty International published the report “Morocco: Human Rights Defenders Targeted with NSO Group’s Spyware”, where we detailed the targeting of Moroccan human rights defenders Maati Monjib and Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui using surveillance technology produced by the company NSO Group. In this current report, Amnesty International now reveals that Omar Radi, another prominent human rights defender and journalist from Morocco was also targeted using NSO Group’s tools.

This blog post is jointly written by Amnesty International and Citizen Lab. Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

Responding to a decision by Tel Aviv District Court on Thursday to close the doors of the hearing of a legal action seeking to revoke the export licence of spyware firm NSO Group, Danna Ingleton, Deputy Director of Amnesty Tech, said:

From sophisticated spyware attacks to mass phishing via smartphones and the rise of facial recognition technology, the range and reach of surveillance threats to human rights defenders is growing.