In December 2021, Eliza Triantafillou, a journalist at the Greek independent media outlet The Inside Story, was searching for the subject of her next article when she saw that Facebook’s parent company Meta had released a report earlier in the month about the “surveillance for hire” industry. The article she produced in response is part of a series of reports by Greek journalists that unraveled the details of a months-long wiretapping and surveillance scandal labeled “Watergate on Steroids.” These findings highlight the shortcomings of governmental regulations and technical capacities in keeping up with the rapidly evolving private surveillance industry, which then enables these very governments to surveil their citizens. So far, there have been four confirmed attempts to infect Greek journalists, politicians and even intelligence officers with a spyware called Predator, which is capable of advanced surveillance of phones, including recording conversations and accessing encrypted chats. Back in December, Triantafillou noticed that both Meta’s report and another released on the same day by Toronto-based research laboratory, Citizen Lab, were connected to Greece. Both reports concluded that Predator, a sophisticated surveillance spyware, had been purchased for use in Greece, among other countries. Cytrox, the North Macedonian company that had developed Predator, belongs to a group of mercenary surveillance providers marketed under the Intellexa label, which has had a corporate presence in Greece since 2020. When Triantafillou published her article in January 2022, she focused on how Meta had removed around 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts that were linked to Cytrox, and how Cytrox had “spoofed” real URLs, including those of credible news outlets. At quick glance, these links looked genuine, but they had slightly different syntax from the actual URL (like a missing letter or an extra symbol). They could be used to trick targets into clicking on them, thus activating the phone’s infection with Predator. “We saw that there was an uneven proportion of Greek domains in this list, because Meta reported 310 spoofed domains, and 43 of them were of Greek interest,” Triantafillou said, over a Zoom interview. “We are a very small country. Our share in the global internet traffic is much smaller than the other countries that, based on those two reports, are among the customers.” When Thanasis Koukakis, another Greek reporter, read Triantafillou’s article, he realised that many of the spoofed domains on the list mimicked news outlets that he used to work for or was still collaborating with. Koukakis had recently uncovered cases of fraud in the country. He already suspected that his conversations were being listened to, and, in August 2020, had filed a complaint to the Communications Privacy Assurance Authority (ADAE), asking it to conduct the necessary checks. Today, we know that he was being wiretapped by the National Intelligence Service (EYP). He received a response from ADAE in July 2021 telling him that there had been no violation of the law, which, as it turns out, did not mean that he wasn’t being spied on. The wiretapping by EYP is technically “legal,” whereas the use of spyware such as Predator is considered illegal in Greece. Article 19 of the Greek Constitution protects the right to privacy in communication. However, exceptions are made for reasons of national security and to investigate serious crimes. Koukakis’s surveillance by EYP was justified by the intelligence agency using the national security argument, even though it is not clear how the work of an investigative journalist could have harmed national security. In March 2021, the government passed an amendment revoking the right of citizens to know if they had been surveilled after their surveillance had ended, which is why Koukakis was not informed about his wiretapping. The government, too, has used this dichotomy between legal and illegal to defend itself. The prime minister has publicly said that, even though the surveillance of a politician was “politically unacceptable,” it was legal, and that the narrative around the issue should not undermine the intelligence agency’s “important work.” When Kyriakos Mitsotakis assumed power as prime minister, he took the EYP under his own command. Today, while he claims no knowledge of the wiretapping, the head of the EYP, along with Mitsotakis’s own nephew and general secretary of the Prime Minister's Office, Grigoris Dimitriadis, have resigned from their positions. In November 2021, Greek journalist Stavros Malichudis was scanning the news when he saw an exposé by the newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton. It was about EYP’s wiretapping of a number of citizens, including journalists.