By Abdelkader Filali, Ottawa. Canada
Morocco reaffirms: “Keep conspiring, Morocco will not change its march. Morocco of Mohammed VI is no longer to be intimidated by governments through their conniving schemes where tools of human rights are used to sabotage the momentum of the Moroccan progress and bring back Morocco under the regency of the old colonial powers”
Who would think that Germany and France would applaud Morocco to finalize the pipeline project with Nigeria? Who would think for a moment that these “Democratic European countries” will be satisfied with Morocco’s south south initiatives and win-win approaches in Africa?
Why Hammouchi in particular? The pro-government German DW broadcasted on July 21, 2020, a video with the intention to diminish the security establishment role? Because simply the man in question proved to be the most credible and efficient in the international scene.
Two years earlier, July 3, 2018, the Spanish newspaper EL PAIS highlighted the M General Director of the Moroccan National Security, Abdellatif Hammouchi, describing him as “the man who never sleeps”.
The newspaper added that, thanks to Hammouchi’s security policy, Morocco succeeded in maintaining security and peace in the country and eliminating every terrorist cell that seeks to defeat the security and stability of the kingdom.
According to the newspaper, security experts in Europe know seriously to what extent security cooperation with Morocco is linked to maintaining security in Europe, thanks to the constant vigilance of Moroccan security in the fight against crime and terrorism.
Manufacturing Whistleblowing for Beginners:
A malign actor stands in the dark to fabricate a malign content. He or she will try to find a delivery vehicle (nowadays it could be a human right organisation, press platforms, social forums. The malign actor sells the malign content and calls it a whistleblowing.
This fabricated whistleblowing is useless unless it is in a delivery system ( so called human rights activists, bloggers, journalists…), which represents a big threat to the spread of deepfakes and creating a sphere of misinformation and disinformation.
Once this malign actor is caught, the delivery systems and vehicles who were so excited in the beginning of the Breaking News Fever find themselves in a tiny corner and left alone to assume crimes of defamation.
Manufactured whistleblowing and data leaks have become a tool of strategic subversion. The intentionally leaked whistleblowing over the Pegasus were engineered in a way that became facets of disinformation campaigns to simply trying hardly to tarnish Morocco’s sovereignty and credibility of its security services.
FinSpy Or Pegasus and The Clash of the two Titans: Germany versus Israel
That is to say: who will dominate the European market? Pegasus or FinSpy? NSO Group’s CEO is claiming that more than 70% of NSO Group’s customers are European nations. One of the delivery vehicles of the manufactured whistleblowing is managed and financed by the Germans. This tells a lot about Morocco and Germany’s crisis.
FinFisher based in Germany and the UK, in 2012 with spyware from Hacking Team based in Italy, and now in 2016 with what appears to be spyware from NSO Group based in Israel and reportedly owned by a US firm. The spyware of these companies were used, owned and operated from democracies. This speaks volumes about the lack of accountability and effective regulation in the cross-border commercial spyware trade.
Setting Up the Stage
What do media and security and intelligence agencies belonging to some “democratic” European countries have to gain by pushing an anti-narrative against Morocco at this very moment in time? Our task is to help the public understand how unfounded narratives have become a hallmark of what we call the Infodemic.
Behind a manufactured whistleblowing stands a malign actor/s who mixes unfounded news with misleading narratives to engineer the perception of a “political evil” coming from a sovereign country to undermine the level of its growth and development. This is the domain where cyber and the manufacturing of whistleblowing work to invent a story for the sole purpose to make of a country de-credible. These have been inter-twined with other tactics, including what is called media and human rights and press narratives that led to the volume of suspicious infrastructure, and anti-official efforts narratives.
The growing challenges of manufactured whistleblowing such as the Pegasus “rush” and misinformation, defamation, deliberate disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false information have not only made certain European security services more ridicule, but they have also fueled a sentiment of mistrust in the future at these agencies as they have poisoned public sphere and threatened the very basis of the human intel.
Manufactured Whistleblowers Without Borders
The first impression that I had while watching a particular NewsChannel that belongs to the Elysée is its borderless nature of disinformation, defamation that has grown, both on overt channels (so called social media platforms, but even more so on encrypted channels like the news channels. In a quick survey that does not require a degree in communication shows an impact of a channel in the Middle East that fed the international media about Pegasus.
So called democratic states are further tested by disinformation and misinformation from internal and external actors that deepens polarization among their populations and divides national loyalty between governments in power and opposition that rejects fact-based information, uses militancy and assistance from outside actors to its advantage, chipping away at unity, to the strong detriment of national and economic security.
We ask how “These European security and media agencies” leaked out in a destructive way to the public, and journalists. Numerous cases of destructive “manufactured whistleblowing” leakage that relies on defamation, misinformation and mobilization through spaces, sites and channels deliberately, whenever the opportunity arises, to diminish and despise the image of serious and responsible security services in the south and fabricating all the myths and justifications to achieve the intended goal.
The truth is that the manufactured whistleblowing trend today has become, from its excessive repetition in some places, the character of destruction and poisoning, if it seeks to formulate people’s awareness and opinion on their moods in a way that perpetuates intractable psychological states
What we fear is that the manufactured whistleblowing will turn from a fallen security intel approach to an intellectual behavior that may converge around political and intellectual elites that include the rightists and leftists.
German and French Intel and Malign Actors
Unfortunately, the entrapment of the French intel has created a distrust of the government information and its management of intel. The entrapment furnished the ground for cognitive dissonance combined with confirmation bias and good old-fashioned paranoia that are very hard to beat with facts and logic. It’s all about fear, emotions. The more you fight it, the worse it becomes. It is not “misinformation” and the manufactured whistleblowing of the French intel that is “distorting” rather, the SAME invented leaks were being processed in different ways by people living different stories. Stories, and the narratives to which they attach, are not just nice fluffy things we tell children at bedtime. They make the difference between war and stability, between life and death. The polarization of the info-demic goes beyond behavior and policy preferences. It is happening at the most basic level: the interpretation of facts.
Malign actors politicize the issue in question from day one by creating a perfect storm to deepening existing divides and setting people of the same nation against each other.
In the digital world, a digital society requires a new set of transparent security agencies of France and Germany. This goes far beyond the need to protect oneself from on-line scams or the theft of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The French and the German Educational system are required to intervene in this matter to find a way to inoculate the verified and hammered news from hostile and manufactured whistleblowing and disinformation. The French and the German civil society and the repositioned legislature need to come out swinging with programs that drive understanding, public ally track the origins of disinformation topics.
Morocco’s Clear Message: Getting Rid of “Teacher and the Student” Rhetoric
“The rail is set off. Will Europe remain passive, or will it embark? declared the Moroccan Foreign Affairs Minister. He adds: “The regional conflict over the Moroccan Sahara creates instability for Europe in North Africa. Hence, European countries are called upon today to express their practical and clear support for the autonomy initiative, and to depart from the logic of expressing this in rhetoric.”
In theory, those who contributed to the founding of an integrated and ‘unionized’ Europe, draw the frames of a solid setting embedded with democratic norms and values shared by all members states. When it comes to practice and when we want to operationalize the concept of Europeanization, we clearly argue that there are manufacturing whistleblowing, which are morbid symptom of the union. We do not need a deeper diagnostic of the situation to conclude that Morocco has become a competent and a regional power and that the time of economic prosperity and wealth of Europe has gone.