“Predator scandal: the European surveillance market is a black hole”, 19 March 2023

Journalists, ministers, publishers, entrepreneurs, all caught up in the Watergate of Athens. That’s what the Greek media are calling the scandal over illegal wiretapping directly involving the government of Nea Dimokratia, the centre-right party of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The kind of wiretapping that Greek law forbids.

The latest blow to the government was dealt on November 6th, when the newspaper Document, close to the opposition Syriza party, published a list of 33 names of those who were targeted by Predator…

The scandal broke last January in Greece, when some local journalists – including colleagues from the Reporters United news consortium – began publishing information about the victims of spying and the network of entrepreneurs who brought this technology to Athens…

...Predator, is developed by the company Cytrox, originally based in North Macedonia, and now part of the Intellexa Alliance group: a conglomerate based in Greece and led by Tal Dilian, a former member of the Israeli intelligence community…The joint venture has a presence in Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, France and Hungary. While Cytrox produces Predator, the company that supplied the software to the state is called Krikel. According to the Greek newspaper Inside Story, although on paper they are different entities, Krikel and Intellexa can be traced back to the same Greek businessmen with close ties to the government.

The Greek scandal was the subject of an investigation by the European Parliament PEGA Committee of Inquiry…

Thanks to these contracts, Krikel grew from zero turnover in 2017 to a €7.4 million project in 2021. That same year, the National Intelligence Service purchased a wiretapping system from the Italian company RCS Lab through Krikel, an authorised reseller in Greece. RCS had recently been acquired by Italy’s Cy4gate group, a direct competitor of the Israeli company NSO, the developer of Pegasus…

Citizen Lab’s analysis revealed the presence of servers communicating with the spyware in Greece. Confirmation also came from a second December 2021 report, published by the US company Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), with a list of web domains that were compromised with Cytrox software…

…Cytrox is part of the Intellexa Alliance, along with Nexa Technologies, WiSpear and Senpai Technologies…

…According to Haaretz , the firm provides a three-part service: the first is the hacking technology, with the ability to spy on 10 live targets at the same time; the second part is a software, called Nova Platform, capable of bringing all the data together; the third part, Haaretz continues, involves the sale of support and project management services (including “technical, operational and methodological support”), something that is not allowed under Israeli law. They can market technologies, in fact, and not services. The complete package is sold at a price of $8 million.

…In January 2023 the Greek Data Protection Authority issued a 50,000 euro fine to Intellexa for failing to cooperate as part of an ongoing spyware investigation. In the meantime the Hellenic police searched homes of individuals and company facilities allegedly related to the case.

Greece’s parliament passed a bill criminalising the sale or possession of spyware and making the private use of spyware a felony punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment…