Greece¶
The Greek cases show surveillance spread across lawful and commercial channels, so that each can deny responsibility for the targeting. Accountability has reached those who operated the software and stopped short of those who chose the targets, and the question of whether the state kept the list has been closed rather than answered. The gap between the two channels is where responsibility disappears.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these. Those targeted, opposition politicians and journalists among them, do not know who wanted them watched or whether the watching has stopped, and their sources have reason to keep away. Reporters and politicians not yet targeted may assume they could be. A state that leaves the question closed tells future clients that the vendors carry the risk and the clients do not, and a list compiled with bought software can serve a foreign service as readily as a domestic one. A reopened investigation, or an appeal court asking the question the trial did not, could still change that.
April 2026: The file stays closed¶
On 27 April 2026 the Supreme Court prosecutor, Konstantinos Tzavellas, kept the Predator spyware investigation closed, ruling that evidence cited by an Athens criminal court was not new enough to reopen it. That court had convicted four people of illegal surveillance targeting 87 victims, with sentences capped at eight years and suspended pending appeal, and referred questions about further participants to the prosecutor. The prosecutor’s closed investigation found no involvement of any Greek state agency, the National Intelligence Service (EYP) included; Human Rights Watch notes that the trial did not address the responsibility of those who ordered the surveillance. The clerks note that a court established who ran the software, and that the question of whether the state kept the list was closed rather than answered.
August 2022: The leader’s phone¶
In late July Nikos Androulakis, an MEP and the leader of PASOK, revealed that the European Parliament’s services had found on his phone a text message with a link “meant to install Predator”. The National Intelligence Service (EYP) had also placed him under surveillance from September 2021 for three months, and the journalist Thanasis Koukakis had been hit by Predator, according to Citizen Lab. In early August the EYP’s director, Panagiotis Kontoleon, and Grigoris Dimitriadis, general secretary of the prime minister’s office and his nephew, resigned. The government says it never bought or used Predator; Mitsotakis called the EYP’s surveillance “legal but politically unacceptable”. The clerks note that two lists are now in question, the service’s lawful one and the spyware’s, and that nobody has said whether they overlap.