'Editorial- IFJ Voice- January 2022', 17 January 2022

The international consortium of 17 international media outlets, Forbidden Stories, has uncovered what will go down as one of the worst assaults on press freedom in 2021: the Pegasus Project. 

The Pegasus spyware, created and sold by the Israeli company NSO, has been used for several years to systematically monitor journalists and civil society activists via their smartphones, without them being aware of it. No less than a dozen governments in the world have purchased this software to monitor more than 50,000 colleagues (at least)...

The consequences are disastrous for journalism: freedom of the press is trampled on; the protection of sources is flouted and journalists find themselves in real danger and at the mercy of the least scrupulous governments.

This year, we will continue, through our global expert group on surveillance, our close collaboration with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations to ban the marketing of this type of software, to prevent these scandalous practices and to support investigative journalism...