The Pegasus book (by Richard and Rigaud) describes the Kafkaesque experience of a young Moroccan investigative journalist, Omar Radi.
June 22, 2020: Forbidden Stories posted a story of the Pegasus attack on Omar Radi…..2 days later, Omar was summoned to the BNJP offices in Casablanca…..accused of working with foreign intelligence agencies.
2023:
Morocco denies jailed journalist Omar Radi post-surgical care in hospital
October 17, 2023 6:19 AM EDT
https://cpj.org/2023/10/morocco-denies-jailed-journalist-omar-radi-post-surgical-care-in-hospital
Radi’s family have repeatedly expressed concerns about his health as he has asthma and Crohn’s disease and protested over his 2022 transfer to Tiflet from Casablanca, where he was receiving treatment for his digestive condition and visits from family based in the city……
……..After his arrest in 2020, Radi was given a six-year prison sentence in 2021 for undermining state security and sexual assault. Press freedom advocates in Morocco told CPJ they believed the charges were unfounded and in retaliation for his investigative work.
Morocco hit the international news when it suffered a serious earthquake in 2023 in the Atlas Mountains, where many of the indigenous people live. It has been a popular tourist magnet due to its magnificent landscape, where the Amazigh have lived for thousands of years. The Indigenous land of Imazighen is a region called Tamazgha, encompassing Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Western Sahara, Mauritania, the Canary Islands, and parts of Egypt, Mali, and Niger.
The Romans called these people Barbarians, from which the name Berber derives. Needless to say, they prefer to be called Amazigh.
Deep in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, the ancient Berbers live on, defying a harsh environment, and remaining loyal to their traditions and way of life in some of the most hard-to-reach parts of the African continent.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/berbers-and-their-traditions-endure-in-moroccos-atlas-mountains-1.152733
Indomitable and proud, they call themselves the Amazigh, which is believed to mean “free people” or “noble men,” and trace their origins as an indigenous people in western North Africa to at least 10,000BC
As with many indigenous people, the Amazigh have been protesting the commandeering of their lands for industrial exploitation for a very long time:
the longest protests in Africa— led by the Indigenous Amazigh community in southeast Morocco against the highly exploitative extractive mining industry. Although it concluded around 2020, after a nearly decade-long protest, this movement was preceded by the historical struggle for recognition of the Amazigh identity, culture and language.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-01-05/how-the-indigenous-amazigh-people-in-morocco-fight-for-language-and-land
Omar Radi took an interest in writing about their protests to defend their lands, and he was silenced, and it would seem, so were they. There has been no reported protests since 2020.
In Israel the cybersurveillance industry was thriving, as Apple had built a centre of excellence just round the corner to NSO, back in 2015:
“When CEO Tim Cook and his gurus were deciding where to situate Apple Inc.’ s largest R& D facility outside the United States, they had few limits. The company’s annual net profits were around $ 40 billion a year and climbing, as was the global market share of its mobile phone. Cook and company had the planet to choose from, and they picked a midsize suburb pinched between sea and desert, 7,500 miles from their headquarters in Cupertino, California, in a country with less than nine million inhabitants and a gross domestic product in the vicinity of Norway’s and Nigeria’s. Apple erected a gleaming twenty-first-century glass box of an eco-friendly building in that faraway spot and reserved 180,000 square feet of office space for seven hundred of its employees—with room to grow. The talk in that building and beyond was that this new facility would be the launchpad for future versions of Apple’s signature product, the iPhone. If anybody at Apple had an inkling that a few dozen NSO cyber-researchers right around the corner from the new digs were spending their days and nights hunting for weaknesses to exploit in the iPhone operating software, they didn’t show it. NSO was barely known at the time and not really on Apple’s threat radar. So the relatively small spyware company’s presence certainly didn’t shake the conviction that the business district of Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, was the place to be. “Apple is in Israel,” Tim Cook said on his visit to inaugurate the new R& D center in February 2015, “because the engineering talent here is incredible.” Talent in Herzliya was hard to miss; an air of ambition and confidence permeated the restaurants and bars catering to the thousands of cybersecurity specialists and coders and software engineers working at dozens of neighborhood tech firms. The talk at table was often loud and learned and argumentative, whether debating the merits of the latest dating app or the latest job listings—must possess “a deep knowledge of radical Islam”—or the latest elections. This cohort was among the brightest 1 percent in Israel (the government had the test scores to prove it), working in the most lucrative and most glamorous field in the country. These young men and women were, quite literally, the Chosen People—identified as schoolchildren as possessors of uncommon intelligence, then encouraged to pursue math, physics, and computer science and to prepare for their extraordinary personal destinies.”
Pegasus’ Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Amnesty International let it be known Omar Radi was hoping his investigation might lead to a change of mind regarding the treatment of these indigenous people.
June 22, 2020
Omar Radi: the Moroccan journalist who won’t be silenced
Moroccan journalist Omar Radi has learned to assume that he is always under surveillance. He is tailed as he investigates stories, his computer has been hacked and his phone has been targeted by sophisticated spyware
………
phone hacking and old-fashioned street surveillance.
A new Amnesty investigation has revealed that his phone was repeatedly targeted using Pegasus spyware from Israeli company NSO Group between January 2019 and January 2020. The tool silently gives an attacker complete access to messages, emails, media, microphone, camera, calls and contacts.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/omar-radi-moroccan-journalist-refuses-to-be-silenced
borderslynn 
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