Journalists under surveillance. Wiretapping of political opponents. The scandal is called "Greek Watergate". But not enough people are paying attention.
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On a Saturday morning last November, Stavros Malihoudis, a Greek journalist, made a cup of coffee and started scrolling through Facebook, where he came across a bombshell report from the left-wing news agency EFSYN: According to the article, the Greek Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring scrutinizing the activities of people who were doing refugee-related work, even listening to their phones. Mr. Malihoudis was stunned.
As he read, he noticed that some of the details seemed strangely familiar. A journalist with an interest in intelligence services, the publication revealed, was reporting on a young Syrian refugee imprisoned on the Aegean island of Kos. Mr. Malihoudis was in the process of reporting just such a story.
He contacted EFSYN reporters, who confirmed that the unnamed reporter in the story was in fact him. According to their report, the Hellenic National Intelligence Service, or EYP – the equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency – was monitoring his activities for the news agency. Solomon and had his phone tapped. Having secured a two-month surveillance warrant from a prosecutor, authorities were free to listen to any of his personal or business calls. (Government officials did not respond to a request for comment about the wiretapping.)
"I was very scared," Mr. Malihoudis told us. For months he was in a precarious emotional place. "When I talked to my mother, to my friends, to my sources, I felt really exposed." He pretty much stopped using his phone.
In the year that Mr. Malihoudis first read his work in another news outlet, the scandal has snowballed. A financial journalist learned that he had also been tapped. The government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis admitted that the state intelligence service was monitoring the opposition leader. Two government officials, including the prime minister's nephew, resigned.
It is called the Greek Watergate.
But the spying allegations are ominous for Greek journalists in a different way: It took a long time for mainstream media and the general public to pay much attention.
We have both reported extensively on the forced migration crisis in Greece, Lauren from the United States and Lydia from Greece, where she grew up. But migration is occurring at an increasingly dangerous rate. Today, any journalist covering refugee arrivals on the Aegean islands or on the Evros land border with Turkey risks arrest. Journalists avoid refugee landings, fearing that, like many workers in the field of humanitarian aid currently on trial, could be wrongfully accused of human trafficking and espionage.
We are also watching with increasing concern as Greek officials flatly deny they have well-sourced reporting and criticize their fellow journalists in press conferences and online. "I will not accept anyone pointing the finger at this government and accusing it of inhumane behavior," Mr Mitsotakis told a Dutch journalist last year — even, it seems, if the accusations are supported by facts. Since the wiretapping scandal broke, journalists in Greece have become extra cautious. We checked our phones for spyware, deleted conversations with sources from our phones to protect them, and now only chat on Signal or in person for fear of being tracked.
Responding to questions about the state of press freedom in Greece, government spokesman and deputy prime minister Ioannis Economou rejected the idea that journalists there were operating in an increasingly repressive climate.
"Democratic values such as the rule of law, freedom of speech and transparency are at the heart of what the Greek government stands for," said Mr Oikonomou. "To claim otherwise is simply wrong."
Despite this statement, by external measures the state of the media in Greece is clearly on a downward slope. Journalists' tracking caused Greece to drop from 70th to 108th place Reporters Without Borders press freedom report — the lowest ranking in all of Europe.
Other recent events reflect the plight of the media in Greece. In April 2021, for example, Greek investigative journalist Giorgos Karaivaz, who covered organized crime and policing, was fatally shot in broad daylight outside his home in what police experts later described as "death contract by the mafia", and the investigation appears to have stalled indefinitely. In 2022, two Greek journalists they discovered improvised bombs outside their homes, and in early October, American photojournalist Ryan Thomas was physically assaulted by the MAT while documenting a demonstration in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, where residents were protesting new development projects. Last week, Nikos Pilos, a photojournalist, was arrested while covering police action in this city.
But the spying scandal, and how it unfolded in public, raised a more fundamental question about whether a country known for its beaches and ancient ruins is struggling to preserve its democratic values.
What happened to the media in Greece? How was even the government's proposal to spy on journalists and opposition leaders initially met with a shrug? For a long time, both ordinary Greeks and those with influence didn't seem bothered by the government's spying on journalists, or in a hurry to do anything about it.
In the immediate aftermath of the revelations, the reported surveillance of Mr. Malihoudis received almost no mention in the Greek media. Only months later, when several independent news sites revealed details of the surveillance of another, more established reporter, Thanasis Koukakis, and shortly thereafter of the leader of an opposition political party, Nikos Androulakis, the story developed into a scandal worthy of widespread coverage.
Mr Koukakis, a financial reporter who had written a series of articles examining the Greek banking sector, said he had heard from government sources that he was being watched by the Greek intelligence service. He soon discovered something else: his phone was infected with Predator, a malicious spyware program far more invasive than wiretapping.
Predator was developed by a company called Cytrox, based in North Macedonia, and is sold in Greece by Intellexa, a company with offices in Athens. As Mr. Koukakis learned, it could be used to listen to his calls, read his texts, and even have the ability to monitor his interpersonal conversations by remotely opening his phone's microphone or camera.
Government officials have denied developing the Predator spyware.
No conclusive link has been made between wiretapping and spyware infections, but two journalists from Reporters United, a small investigative group in Athens, revealed close relationships between a businessman who had relations with Intellexa and Grigoris Dimitriadis, then the prime minister's general secretary in the ministerial office, as well as the prime minister's nephew. Mr Dimitriadis resigned from his post in August following the reports. He immediately sued the news organizations and the journalists behind them, a a move that was widely condemned by the international guardians of press freedom.
"The stories are still open — they haven't been retracted," said Theodoris Chondrogiannos, a reporter for Reporters United and one of the people sued by Mr. Dimitriadis. "We will continue our investigation. We will not fear nor be afraid.'
But pursuing such stories is becoming increasingly difficult in Greece's current media climate. Despite the journalistic value of the wiretapping and spyware scandals, it continues to be covered mainly by the younger, smaller Greek media and the international press.
"For seven months, we were alone," Eliza Triantafillou, an investigative journalist, told a European Parliament committee investigating spyware use during a hearing in September. He has broken several stories about Predator and spyware in Greece for the Inside Story . "Two very small media outlets, with very limited resources ... And for all the major media outlets — newspapers, radio, television — the story was not there," he said.
In an interview, Ms. Triantafyllou said she believes the main challenge in modern Greek media is the lack of financial independence, which is "getting worse year by year." Long-standing media companies in Greece tend to receive state funding and are owned by wealthy businessmen with other interests — such as those who run a shipping company, a telecommunications company and a bank. From the point of view of independent journalists, this means that it is difficult to report any news that criticizes the government, these businesses or their close associates.
The financial precariousness of journalism in Greece intensifies the problem of journalistic independence. During the Greek debt crisis that began in late 2009 and again during the pandemic, news agencies faced significant budget cuts and mass layoffs. During the Covid pandemic, the federal government allocated €20 million for a public health campaign and distributed the funds largely to news organizations that championed their cause, to the exclusion of others.
"Many media considered 'opposition' received disproportionately lower levels of advertising revenue compared to more pro-government media, despite many having higher circulation and readership," he wrote in a letter the International Press Institute, a non-profit organization for press freedom, to the then Greek government.
In one recent poll of the country's journalists, 28 percent of respondents reported receiving less than 800 euros (about $797) a month from their journalism jobs, and 29 percent reported being paid less than 1,200 euros (about $1,195) a month.
While many Greeks seem to believe that journalism is essential to democracy, few seem willing to pay for it. In the wake of the economic crisis in Greece, the average circulation of national political newspapers fell dramatically, to 216,500 in 2011 from 400,000 in 2005. Between 2011 and 2021, sales of daily newspapers fell by 74%, according to annual figures published by Hellenic. Statistical Authority .
In response, several small, independent news organizations—such as Reporters United, Inside Story, and Solomon—have begun operating in Greece in recent years, funded by grants, subscriptions, reader contributions, and partnerships to ensure more independent reporting.
The threats to a free Greek press are so dire that members of the European Parliament recently convened a roundtable discussion in Athens to, among other things, get to the bottom of allegations of surveillance. As his Stefanos Loukopoulos said Vouliwatch, a non-profit monitoring and transparency organization, the state of traditional media in Greece also threatens the state of democracy in the country.
"What has happened with the Greek mainstream media is the capture of the press by the companies and the government," he said. The prime minister, he added, placed national broadcaster ERT under his direct control when he took office in 2019.
Mr. Oikonomou, the government spokesman, countered that criticism, writing in a statement: "Greece has a vibrant, diverse and open media," adding, "a cursory glance at any newsstand in Greece shows a vast array of titles, many that hold the government and public officials to account on a daily basis and in the strongest possible way."
And yet last year, the New Democracy government passed a law that makes it even easier to arrest journalists. Ostensibly aimed at “fake news,” this law threatens with imprisonment “anyone who publicly or through the Internet in any way disseminates false news that is likely to cause public concern or fear or to undermine public confidence in the national economy, defense capacity of the country or public health". According to Human Rights Watch, the sweeping language of this law means that journalists they could face jail time even when they appeared to criticize the government.
It doesn't help that Greek journalists also work in a landscape of massive public distrust — which also hurts advertising revenue and circulation numbers, further destabilizing the industry. According to a recent exhibition of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, only 27 percent of Greeks said they felt they could trust the news in general.
However, only 7 percent of Greeks said the country's media was free from undue government influence and 8 percent from commercial interests – the lowest of the 46 countries surveyed. Research of the European Commission in 2016 found that only the 12% believes that the Greek media provide information without political or commercial pressure. According to a recent report by the Rapid Response Network for Media Freedom in Europe, "press freedom in Greece continued its marked deterioration" this year.
Because of this negative perception of journalism, Mr. Malihoudis told us: "When I meet someone in the bar and, drinking a beer, and I say I'm a journalist, I feel like I have to explain: but I'm fine... You know? I'm okay."
*Cover Photo: Headlines announced the killing of Giorgos Karaivaz, a Greek journalist, in April 2021. He was shot multiple times outside his home during the day.Credits…Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Source: The New York Times