Over the past decade, civil society organisations, researchers, and journalists have exposed how governments around the world have been unlawfully targeting activists, journalists, and politicians using tools developed by private cyber-surveillance companies. Amnesty International and numerous civil society organisations have repeatedly warned that states’ opaque trade and deployment of privately manufactured surveillance technologies, particularly spyware, have wrought a digital surveillance crisis, which has severely and detrimentally impacted human rights, media freedoms, and social movements across the world.

The 2021 Pegasus Project disclosures – which exposed the global scale and breadth of unlawful surveillance facilitated by NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware – and subsequent civil society research have forced governments around the world to take note of the massive scale and breadth of spyware abuse, spurring the beginnings of action to rein in some of the most notorious spyware vendors. However, fresh disclosures by Amnesty International, and the findings of the new Predator Files investigation coordinated by European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) media network, have laid bare how government action has been inadequate and ineffective in ending spyware abuse. This report details these findings.