Ep. 2 — Spying on journalists: Greece’s phone hacking scandal — #108 The fall of press freedom in Greece

Greece is back on the front page of the international media after a significant phone-tapping scandal. The wiretaps were carried out against the journalist investigating financial scandals, Thanasis Koukakis, and the political leader of the third largest political party, Nikos Androulakis. A short time earlier, another journalist who specialized in the refugee issue, Stavros Malichoudis, had discovered that he was being monitored by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) as an enemy of the state. The Predator malware was used for the surveillance. As a consequence of the revelations, the general secretary and nephew of the prime minister, Grigoris Dimitriadis, and the commander of the NIS, Panagiotis Kontoleon, resigned. 

For episode 2, we talked to the journalists who were victims of phone tapping and to the journalists who carried out the months-long investigations and brought the wiretapping scandal to light. 

Show notes:

For this episode, our guests are the Greek journalists and victims of surveillance Stavros Malichoudis and Thanasis Koukakis, and the investigative journalists Tasos Telloglou and Elisa Triantafyllou.