"A Digital Prison": Surveillance and the suppression of civil society in Serbia
Amnesty International's report highlights the extensive surveillance and suppression of civil society in Serbia. It details the case of journalist Slaviša Milanov, whose phone was hacked using Cellebrite technology and a new spyware called NoviSpy. The report underscores the broader implications of digital repression in Serbia, where state control over civil society is increasingly tightening.
- ▪Slaviša Milanov, an independent journalist, experienced suspicious activity on his phone after a police encounter.
- ▪Amnesty International discovered that Cellebrite technology was used to unlock his device without due process.
- ▪The report reveals the use of multiple spyware forms and highlights the oppressive surveillance environment in Serbia.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Amnesty International Security Lab |
| Canonical URL | https://securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2024/12/a-digital-prison-surveillance-and-the-suppression-of-civil-society-in-serbia/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 07:33:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T08:02:00.886Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T08:02:00.886Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | AfgLcQ-OvUaW |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This is the Executive Summary of Amnesty International’s report on surveillance and the suppression of civil society in Serbia. Please click here for the full report in PDF format. You can read the Executive Summary in Serbian, French or Spanish. Spyware threats facing Serbian civil societyNoviSpy spyware connects back to BIAMisuse of Cellebrite Digital Forensic ToolsCrackdown on civic space in SerbiaSerbia’s inadequate legal and oversight frameworkChilling effectHuman rights responsibilities of companies and other partiesConclusions and recommendationsPreviousNext In February 2024, Slaviša Milanov, an independent journalist from Dimitrovgrad in Serbia who covers local interest news stories, was brought into a police station after a seemingly routine traffic stop.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Amnesty International Security Lab.
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