In the middle of August, Athens seems calm, and MPs have already started to desert the Parliament. But on July 30, the decision of the Greek Supreme Court to exonerate the intelligence services and the current government in the wiretapping affair, dubbed by the press the “Greek Watergate”, has reawakened the political scene. Only four representatives of the company that marketed the Predator spyware will ultimately be prosecuted for “having violated the secrecy of telephone communications”The opposition, the victims and civil society are up in arms.
Reporters Without Borders has “deplored the Supreme Court's decision to clear the intelligence service, under the authority of the Prime Minister” and denounced a form of impunity. The leader of the main Greek left-wing opposition party Syriza, Stefanos Kasselakis, stressed that “his trust in Greek justice had been shattered”The leader of the Socialist Party, Nikos Androulakis, himself the victim of an attempted hacking of his phone by the Predator software, even accused “the government for having first infested the secret services and now the judicial system”.
In 2022, this scandal broke out precisely after Mr. Androulakis admitted to having been targeted by the Predator spyware, which allows, once the phone is infected, to record messages and calls – including those made through encrypted applications –, to have access to passwords or the browsing history of the device on the Internet. Marketed in Greece by the company Intellexa, the cost of the software was estimated at 14 million euros. Shortly after his election in 2019, the conservative Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, had placed the intelligence services directly under his aegis. Since then, cases of espionage, by traditional means (recording of telephone conversations) or by means of spyware have exploded: more than 15,000 phones are said to have been monitored by Greek intelligence, according to the press.
Several investigative media outlets such as Reporters United or Inside Story reveal the government's links to the Intellexa company. Grigoris Dimitriadis, chief of staff to Prime Minister Mitsotakis, whose nephew he is, has resigned after the publication of a damning investigation showing that he is well acquainted with Felix Bitzios, deputy director of Intellexa.
Mr Mitsotakis, since the beginning of the scandal, claims not to have been aware of the wiretapping of the socialist leader and assures that the Greek state “never purchased or used” Predator. But as the months went by, the revelations piled up and the Greek Data Protection Authority calculated that 87 people were targeted by the Predator, including opposition MPs, conservative ministers, the prime minister's own camp, leaders of the armed forces, business leaders and journalists. Worse, according to Inside Storythe Greek foreign ministry reportedly gave permission to export the spyware to Sudan and Madagascar.
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Source: Lemonde
