75 results arranged by date
The last time New York Times cybersecurity journalist Nicole Perlroth spoke with Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor in 2016, his passport had been taken and he had recently been beaten almost to the point of death. “We learned later on that our phone conversation had been tapped, that someone was in his baby monitor, that his…
In a mid-2020 Washington Post opinion piece, Lebanese Al-Jazeera broadcast journalist Ghada Oueiss described hackers stealing private photos and videos from her phone and posting them online. The leak resulted in a sharp escalation of online attacks, Oueiss told CPJ in a January 2021 call. Since the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi…
In early 2020, Vietnamese writer Bui Thanh Hieu told Marina Mai, a freelancer based in Berlin, that he was closing his blog to protect his family. In 2009, Hieu was detained for a week for his critical writing on Vietnam’s territorial disputes with China, as CPJ documented. In 2013, he fled to Germany, but continued writing…
New York, December 21, 2020 – NSO Group’s advanced Pegasus spyware was identified on phones of at least 36 journalists and media executives in July and August 2020, according to the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which said the surveillance product was installed via a vulnerability in the iPhone messaging application. Most targets were affiliated…
The 10th time journalist Omar Radi was summoned by Moroccan police this summer, he was arrested on multiple charges including undermining state security and sexual assault, as CPJ documented in July. He was placed in solitary confinement in the Oukacha Prison in Casablanca to reduce the risk of exposure to COVID-19, and remained there as…
On July 5, 2020, police in Casablanca arrested Omar Radi and Imad Stitou, investigative journalists at the Moroccan Le Desk news website, for alleged “public intoxication and violence,” and detained them overnight, according to Le Desk and news reports. The journalists were held in police custody and then released on July 6 pending an investigation…
Yesterday, the Committee to Protect Journalists joined seven other human rights and free expression groups in writing a letter to European Union Trade Commissioner Phil Hogan, requesting that human rights provisions be included in draft EU legislation concerning the exports of technology products such as surveillance software, which could be used for both civilian and…
In the summer of 2019, Saroj Giri was preparing a lecture on the panopticon—an 18th century system to surveil an entire prison from a single viewpoint—when a message lit up his phone. It was from WhatsApp, warning Giri that someone had tried to hack the popular messaging app to spy on his cell phone remotely.
Washington, January 22, 2020—The Committee to Protect Journalists today joined U.N. human rights experts in calling for an investigation into the alleged hacking of The Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The U.N. experts called the alleged hacking “an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia.”