Amnesty international what does the logo mean

Once successfully installed on the phone, Pegasus spyware gives NSO clients complete device access and thereby the ability to bypass even encrypted messaging apps like Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.

Pegasus can be activated at will until the device is shut off. According to Guarnieri, Pegasus operators are able to remotely record audio and video, extract data from messaging apps, use the GPS for location tracking, and recover passwords and authentication keys, among other things. These types of digital technologies go hand-in-hand with physical surveillance, according to Ostrovskiy. Surveillance of journalists is not new, security experts say. What has changed is the market for spyware.

Some reporters, like Moroccan freelance investigative journalist Omar Radi, whose cyber intrusion Forbidden Stories reported on in , or Indian journalist and human rights defender Anand Teltumbde, were imprisoned after their phone infections were documented by advocacy groups and media outlets.

Spyware companies have faced relatively few legal or financial consequences for the use of their spyware against journalists and human rights defenders — although recent legal cases have begun to put pressure on these providers. According to plaintiffs in that case, information gleaned through digital surveillance was used to identify and hunt down opponents of deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who were later tortured in prison.

People who were doing activism that was again, protesting corruption, protesting authoritarianism, those were often the people who were on the front lines of being spied on.

NSO Group maintains that its technology is used exclusively by intelligence agencies to track criminals and terrorists. Although the company also says that it has a list of 55 countries that it will not sell to on account of their human rights records, those countries are not listed in the report.

According to the report, NSO Group has revoked access to five clients since after investigations into misuse and terminated contracts with five others that did not meet human rights standards. Yet the leaked data show that many other authoritarian governments known to repress freedom of speech remain clients. As part of the Pegasus Project, Forbidden Stories has been able to document the use of Pegasus for the first time in Azerbaijan.

More than 40 Azerbaijani journalists were selected as targets, including reporters from Azadliq. In Azerbaijan, most independent news outlets are blocked and family members of journalists have routinely been harassed by the authorities.

As a freelance reporter for Mehdar TV, Vaqifqizi had already received a number of threats, and in February was badly beaten while covering a protest. The reporter, in her early 30s with shoulder-length black hair, told journalists from the Forbidden Stories consortium that she already assumed the government had access to her private information. As Amnesty International and others have documented, Azerbaijani activists have been physically and digitally targeted even after leaving the country.

The journalist used to lived in the building, which doubles as an exposition space and a residence for refugee journalists. He has since moved out, but still shares a small office on the ground floor where he goes to work three times per week.

Before speaking with Forbidden Stories, Mansouri turned off his borrowed phone and buried it deep in his backpack. Mansouri, a freelance investigative journalist and cofounder of the Moroccan Association of Investigative Journalists AMJI, by its French initials who is currently working on a book about the illegal drug trade in Moroccan prisons, fled Morocco in after numerous legal and physical threats against him.

In , he was beaten by two unknown assailants after leaving a meeting with human rights defenders, including historian Maati Monjib, who was later targeted with Pegasus. A year later, armed intelligence agents raided his home at 9 a.

Five years later, Mansouri found out he was still a target of the Moroccan government. Many of the Moroccan journalists selected as targets have been at some point arrested, defamed or targeted in some way by intelligence services.

Others who were selected as targets — including most notably newspaper editors Taoufik Bouachrine and Soulaimane Raissouni — are currently in prison on charges that human rights defense organizations contend were instrumentalized in an effort to shut down independent journalism in Morocco. Bouachrine, the editor of Akhbar al-Youm, was arrested in February on charges of human trafficking, sexual assault, rape, prostitution, and harassment.

Of 14 women who allegedly accused Bouachrine, 10 showed up to court and five declared that Bouachrine was innocent, according to CPJ. The publisher had previously penned op-eds critical of the Moroccan regime, accusing various high level government officials of corruption. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and spent more than a year in solitary confinement. Forbidden Stories and its partners have been able to confirm that the numbers of at least two women involved in the case were selected as targets of Pegasus.

In , still awaiting trial, Raissouni began a hunger strike that as of this writing, had lasted more than days. His family members said that after 76 days he was in critical condition.

While in the past Moroccan journalists were routinely hit with legal attacks for things they wrote — such as defamation or disrespecting the king — the new tactic was to accuse them of more serious crimes such as espionnage and later rape and sexual assault, he said. Surveillance emerged as a key tool in gleaning personal information that could be used to those ends.

Foreign journalists who have covered the plight of Moroccan journalists have also been selected as targets and in some cases their phones were successfully infected. In June of that year, Plenel had attended a two-day conference in Essaouira, Morocco, at the request of a journalist partner of Mediapart — Ali Amar, the founder of the Moroccan investigative magazine LeDesk — whose phone number also appears in the records accessed by Forbidden Stories.

At the event, Plenel gave a number of interviews in which he spoke about human rights violations committed by the Moroccan state. Upon his return to Paris, suspicious processes began appearing on his device. Director of Mediapart Edwy Plenel. Like Mansouri, many Moroccan journalists have either fled the country or stopped doing journalism altogether. Surviving today means internalizing a high level of self-censorship, unless you support the authorities of course. On October 2, , around 1 pm, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Turkey and never came back out.

Close friends, colleagues and family members of the murdered journalist were all selected as targets by NSO clients that appear to be the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, according to the Pegasus Project revelations released today.

On March 2, , local Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda took out his phone and recorded his final broadcast. In it, the reporter from the city of Altamirano, who ran a Facebook with more than 50, followers, spoke about alleged collusion between state and local police and the leader of a drug cartel.

Two hours later, he was dead — shot at least six times by two men on a motorcycle as he lay in a hammock outside of a car wash. When Pineda was assassinated in , at the age of 38, the world blinked and moved on.

His death was seen as just another reporter killed in Mexico — the deadliest non-conflict zone in the world to be a journalist. Forbidden Stories has been able to confirm that not just Pineda, but also the state prosecutor who investigated the case, Xavier Olea Pelaez, were selected as targets of Pegasus in the weeks and months before his murder. Pelaez did not keep his phone from the time, so it was not possible to confirm an infection by Pegasus. At the time of his selection, Pineda was investigating links between the local crime boss, known as El Tequilero, and the governor of the state of Guerrero, Hector Astudillo.

Friends and family who spoke with Forbidden Stories and its partners said that Pineda had received threats and had asked to be placed in a federal mechanism for the protection of journalists. As Pineda continued to report on the nexus of local politicians and drug traffickers, the threats came ever closer to him.

Amnesty International is a world-embracing movement working for the protection of human rights. It is independent of all governments and is neutral in its relation to political groups, ideologies and religious dividing lines.

The movement works for the release of women and men who have been arrested for their convictions, the colour of their skin, their ethnic origin or their faith — provided that they have not themselves used force or exhorted others to resort to violence.

To begin with, Amnesty International was a British organization, but in an international secretariat was established. Ten years after its foundation the organization comprised more than voluntary groups in 28 countries and the figures are steadily rising.

In February this year there were groups in 33 countries. In the statutes adopted by the organization in these three tasks are named as the most important ones for Amnesty International. Power, Jonathan. Amnesty International. The Human Rights Story. New York: McGraw Hill, Well-illustrated journalistic account. This text was first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.