A profile of the Digital Security Helpline, run by Access Now, which gives 24/7 help to reporters and others who suspect they are victims of government spyware
For more than a decade, dozens of journalists and human rights activists have been targeted and hacked by governments all over the world. LinkedIn: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai . Bluesky: @mohdmaskati and @lorenzofb LinkedIn: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai : NEW: Meet the folks at AccessNow's Digital Security Helpline, who have been investigating government spyware abuses for more than a decade, helping journalists and dissidents all over the world. … Bluesky: Mohammed Al-Maskati / @mohdmaskati : I am happy to see this article about the team I am proud to be part of and to manage every day. All my love to the most outstanding team. ( Helpline at @accessnow.org ) — Meet the team that investigates when journalists and activists get hacked with government spyware. — techcrunch.com/2025/12/27/m... Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / @lorenzofb : NEW: Meet the folks at AccessNow's Digital Security Helpline, who have been investigating government spyware for more than a decade, helping journalists and dissidents all over the world. — I spoke to Hassen Selmi, who heads the incident response team, to learn how his team fights spyware abuses.
Context & Ripple Effects
The helpline sits within a long-running ecosystem of defensive support for at-risk communicators, including earlier work helping journalists use SecureDrop and safer online practices. Its incident-response role addresses the point after a suspected compromise, when specialized investigation and advice are most urgently needed.
The need is reinforced by coverage of a spyware-company hub in Barcelona and reporting that spyware has targeted journalists and dissidents across countries. Access Now’s service is therefore a civil-society counterweight to a geographically distributed surveillance market.
First-order effects
- Reporters, journalists and dissidents who suspect government spyware can access round-the-clock assistance and investigation through Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline.
- Access Now’s incident-response team, led by Hassen Selmi and managed by Mohammed Al-Maskati, becomes a visible intake point for suspected spyware cases and the evidence they may yield.
Second-order effects
- More centralized case handling can help connect otherwise isolated reports of targeting, strengthening the practical support available to media and human-rights organizations.
- The service complements technical remediation by platform vendors, as illustrated when Apple fixed a zero-day linked to Paragon spyware attacks on journalists; affected people still need help assessing and responding to an incident.
Third-order effects
- If demand persists, spyware accountability will increasingly depend on durable civil-society incident-response capacity, not only on one-off investigations or vendor security patches.
- The pattern points to an enduring contest between commercial surveillance capabilities and independent support networks that document their effects on press freedom and dissent.
The trend: Government-spyware exposure is driving the institutionalization of specialized digital incident response for journalists and human-rights defenders.