The wiretapping case had a “happy ending” for the National Security Service and the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, since the Supreme Court announced that it will only prosecute four private persons for misdemeanours. Here are all the steps that the investigation failed to take.
by Eliza Triantafillou / Tasos Telloglou
Part 4 - The baton is passed to the Supreme Court
In the course of his nine-month investigation into the wiretapping case, the Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Achilleas Zisis, limited himself to taking 44 witness statements. He issued only one order, in June 2024, to cross-check Predator targets identified by the Privacy Authority against the privacy waiver orders issued for national security reasons by the NIS – that is, not including those issued by the Anti-Terrorism Agency.
As we wrote recently, the experts appointed by Achilleas Zisis, making their own calculations and several logical leaps, concluded that the fact that 27 people (out of at least 87 targets) were simultaneously targeted with the legal interception ordered by the NIS and the illegal surveillance through the Predator spy software, is a mere coincidence and that the two methods of interception of communications had no relevance to each other.
As Supreme Court Prosecutor Georgia Adilini said in the statement explaining her decision to archive the case regarding the part concerning the NIS and other state agencies and to prosecute individuals on misdemeanor charges for breach of secrecy, during the preliminary examination "almost all the witnesses proposed by the plaintiff-petitioners were examined". What Adilini does not mention, of course, is how superficial the examination of key witnesses was in some cases, and the omission of other persons with knowledge of the facts.
The witness statements collected by the Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court include those of the former prosecutor of the National Intelligence Service, Vasiliki Vlachou (herself a target of Predator), the former commander of the NIS Panagiotis Kontoleon (against whom victims of surveillance have filed lawsuits), Themistocles Demiris (its current commander), high-ranking NIS executives and employees as well as former commanders of the service (Roubatis, Dravillas). Testimonies were also given by (current and former) high-ranking officials and officers of the Hellenic Police.
All their testimonies can be summarized as follows: regarding the legal surveillance, everything was done by the book and nobody knows anything about the illegal surveillance through Predator. Some people just happen to know socially two of the individuals who are indirectly or directly related to the spy software marketed by Intellexa.
Something that prosecutors have known since July 2023, when we published the relevant story, was that a classified draft of a memorandum of cooperation between the NIS in Athens and the Operational Technical Service in Skopje was circulating between the two agencies on cybersecurity issues. Panayiotis Kontoleon admitted to its existence during his testimony to the parliamentary committee of inquiry. This draft had been communicated to the Prime Minister's Office in March 2022, at which time Kyriakos Mitsotakis' nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis, was still in charge. The draft was highly confidential and was the product of meetings between Panagiotis Kontoleon and the head of the OTA, Zoran Angelovski.
As we had published and later testified to the Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court Achilleas Zisis, in this document there was a digital trace left by an Intellexa associate, Nir Ben Moshe, who made editorial corrections to the english text. Nir Ben Moshe was never called to testify. The fact that a classified document which was to be signed by the then commander of the NIS together with the head of the OTA, and of which the Prime Minister's Office had knowledge, had been corrected by Intellexa was obviously not deemed sufficient for Zisis to ask a question about it during the examination of witnesses Panagiotis Kontoleon and Grigoris Dimitriadis.
Throughout the prosecution’s investigation, the fact that none of the –confirmed by the Data Protection Authority– Predator targets and victims were called to testify as witnesses, is striking. The only ones who have testified are those who sought it out on their own.
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