Morocco has been at the heart of a big global spy scandal since yesterday. The French newspaper Le Monde and 16 other editorial staff had access to data shared by the organizations Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International.
It appears that tens of thousands of phones have been spied on by services in many countries using Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli company NSO.
For “officially” to be used in the fight against terrorism and organized crime, this software has rather served in some authoritarian countries monitor critical journalists and political opponents.
More than 6,000 Algerian phones targeted
This is particularly the case in Morocco, where the security services did not content themselves with targeting critical voices internally (all responsible for critical media, according to Le Monde), but went so far as to monitor journalists and other personalities. abroad.
Names of targeted French journalists have been released. There is that of Edwy Plenel, the founder of Mediapart or the polemicist Eric Zemour. Diplomats, senior officials, and elected officials have also been targeted in France. Le Monde speaks of several thousand telephone numbers “+33”, the area code for France.
Algeria is also affected, and on a large scale, it seems, by this espionage operation. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, more than 6,000 Algerian phones have been selected to be targeted by the Pegasus software. No name of Algerian personalities and journalists spied on has filtered. An Amnesty International source confirmed to TSA that Algerian journalists have been targeted by the program. “But at this stage, we can not give more details”, indicates the same source.
“At this stage, we have identified potential NSO clients in 11 countries: Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, and Togo,” a source within from Amnesty International.
