At the end of March, journalist Stavroula Poulimeni and the independent media outlet Alterthess were ordered in first instance to pay compensation of EUR 3,000 to Greek gold mine (Hellas Gold) executive Efstathios Lialos.

According to the ruling, Poulimeni violated the executive’s privacy by writing his name and position in a 2020 article about Lialos’s conviction for environmental pollution in Halkidiki, northern Greece.

The sum is considerably less than the EUR 100,000 requested by Lialos, but at stake, according to Poulimeni, is a question of journalistic freedom. In a statement, Alterthess referred to the verdict as a ‘blow to press freedom’, and expressed the intention to appeal against the court’s decision. ‘Personal #DataProtection doesn’t justify suppressing info vital to public interest’, Reporters Without Borders stated in a tweet.

In the interview that follows, Poulimeni spoke to OBC Transeuropa about her experience as an independent journalist in crisis-ravaged Greece and her reporting on environment degradation in Halkidiki, and explained why the verdict against her threatens the right of the public to be informed.

OBC Transeuropa: What is the professional path that led you to co-found the independent news outlet Alterthess in the middle of the economic crisis? 

I’ve been a journalist since 2008. In 2011, with a group of people – not only journalists – we decided to establish an investigative, independent and collaborative media project in Thessaloniki. We called it Alterthess, because it told stories from an ‘alternative’ Thessaloniki. We cover grassroots initiatives, social issues, human rights, migration, the rights of the  LGBTQIA+ community, and we are outspoken against racism.

When we started, the economic crisis was in full swing, Greece had entered the first ‘Memorandum’ and the European ‘Troika’ had been established in the country. A lot of protests and demonstrations were taking place against austerity measures, but the mainstream media lacked independent analysis. We decided to try and fill this gap, and invested all our energies into Alterthess. The outlet is well connected with local movements and groups, but it’s hard to survive financially. We are trying to gather support from our readers, as we don’t have state funding to rely on.

 

How did you grow interested in environmental issues, and when did you start reporting on the mining project in Skouries? 

I have been covering environmental topics for twelve years now. There are many stories to be told, especially since the wave of privatisations invested public resources such as water, forests, etc.

Alterthess reported on the mining project – and the struggle against it – from the very start. I have been to Skouries many times. There are no trees now, and mining infrastructure has been built. But for many years, protests have been taking place against the project, facing state suppression, police attacks and legal battles. We covered the story from different angles – economical, social, psychological, and, of course, environmental – and we are deeply connected to the local protest movement, even though in the last years it has grown progressively weaker.

 

You and Alterthess were the target of a vexatious lawsuit connected to your work in Skouries. How did it happen? 

On 27 October 2020, two high-ranking executives of Hellas Gold [The company, owned by Canadian Eldorado Gold, which is working on mining development in Skouries], were convicted in the first instance on water pollution charges. On the same day, I wrote an article about it in Alterthess, and nothing happened.

One year later, in September 2021, the conviction was confirmed, and I wrote about it again. The following month, after the second conviction, a lawsuit initiated by Efstathios Lialos, one of the two executives, was notified to us. The lawsuit referred to the article I had written in 2020, after the first conviction, and was based on an alleged violation of GDPR, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation: in my article, I had reported the convicted executives’ names.

 

What was your first reaction when you received the lawsuit?

In a way, I was surprised. Firstly, my article dated back to the previous year; secondly, it did not include any false information, nor did it contain any comment. It merely reported what had happened in court; thirdly, the lawsuit did not require us to take down the article, but asked me and Alterthess to pay EUR 100,000 as compensation for illegal processing of personal data related to a criminal conviction.

On the other hand, what happened was not completely unexpected. While the lawsuit against us came from an individual, we knew that companies use legal threats to silence critical reporting. In Greece, private actors usually resort to advertising as a tool to obtain favourable coverage or not be subjected to journalistic scrutiny. When this is not enough, they resort to legal threats.

 

What were the consequences of the lawsuit on your job and personal life? 

Facing a SLAPP is extremely draining. You have to deal with legal matters on a daily basis, and this has both a psychological and an economic impact. For a long time, you cannot be completely focused on your work. We received the lawsuit in October 2021, and the discussion in court only took place in May 2022. For months, we have been waiting and preparing for the trial. During the time we were waiting for the verdict, we felt a lot of anxiety.

We tried not to be discouraged, and started to publish several articles on the subject of SLAPPs and intimidation of journalists. This is more than just a personal matter: SLAPPs have consequences on public interest reporting in general, because in the future, journalists might be afraid of writing about certain issues.

 

What has been the reaction of fellow journalists and institutions to the lawsuit against you? Have you received support and solidarity from society at large?

When we received the lawsuit, we didn’t know what a SLAPP was, and neither did Greek journalists’ unions. Only later, when we started spreading the word about the issue, we found out that other journalists had been targets of such lawsuits too. International organisations such as the International Press Institute (IPI), Amnesty International and the European Centre for Press & Media Freedom (ECPMF) had more experience; they issued announcements and supported us from the very first day.

As for institutions, our case was raised in the European Parliament by SYRIZA MP Kostas Arvanitis, and there were statements and parliamentary questions in the Greek Parliament as well. However, it was the solidarity of common people and grassroots movements in Skouries and elsewhere that showed us that people recognized the importance of our public interest reporting.

The Greek mainstream media, on the contrary, did not support us much, and this is a problem. As said, I think there is a problem of financial interests exerting control on the media narrative.

 

The first instance verdict partly upheld Lialos’s complaint that his privacy had been unfairly violated. What are the implications of this ruling? 

Our case is quite unusual because it has to do with data protection. If confirmed, a ruling against us could trigger a new wave of prosecutions weaponizing GDPR regulations to inhibit public interest journalism and its ability to call things – and people – by their names. The true stake is not the money we are being asked to pay, but the right of the public to be informed.

 

You hinted at systemic problems in the Greek media landscape. How has the situation evolved over the last few years, and how do SLAPPs fit into the wider picture of declining press freedom in Greece?

The problem of press freedom in Greece has deep roots. It is a complex issue, which also has to do with the economic situation: many media outlets were shut down during the crisis, fellow journalists were laid off, and still today most media workers struggle to make ends meet.

In many respects, things have gotten worse in recent years, not only because of SLAPPs. It is a widespread perception among journalists that private and government actors can more often and easily attack press freedom compared to a few years ago.

The wiretapping scandal has uncovered a worrying surveillance network, but also part of the picture are the frequent police attacks on journalists and photojournalists at demonstrations, and the character assassination on social media, especially against colleagues who cover migration issues and are portrayed as “foreign agents”.

The good news, and hopefully also a turning point, is that the debate on press freedom in Greece has finally opened.

This interview was coordinated as part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism which tracks, monitors and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and candidate countries. 

The affair concerns two distinct operations. The first is EYP’s spying on two journalists, Stavros Malichoudis, a reporter with independent outlet Solomon, and Thanasis Koukakis, a freelance journalist investigating banking and business stories; and also Nikos Androulakis, an MEP and leader of opposition party PASOK. These surveillance operations were carried out through EYP’s “normal” procedure for listening in on a target’s communications, following approval by a prosecutor. The second was the hacking of Koukakis’s and Androulakis’s mobile phones with Predator, a spyware tool that is able to access even encrypted services.

 

Although the surveillance of journalists and political opponents by state services hardly seems like the hallmark of democratic governance, the first procedure can be legal, not only for “national security” reasons, but also in cases of serious crime like drug smuggling or human trafficking. The legal framework in Greece, however, lacks any provision for technically supervising the use of spyware, which in practice makes it illegal.

 

No conclusive link between the two operations has been proven — yet. The fact, though, that they took place one right after the other (in the case of Koukakis) or simultaneously (in the case of Androulakis) raises reasonable suspicions that they are related. Further suspicions about both the use of spyware and the ostensibly legal procedure used against two journalists and a politician are raised not only by the Greek government’s handling of the affair, but also a number of key decisions it has made in the last three years.

 

Legislating against transparency

Soon after being elected in July 2019, the New Democracy government implemented new legislation in two crucial areas regarding the intelligence service: first, it brought it under the direct purview of the office of the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis; second, it amended the required qualifications for the position of director of intelligence, so it could appoint the prime minister’s favourite, Panayiotis Kontoleon, who fell short of the previous criteria.

 

Less than two years later, in March 2021, it made another controversial move: it introduced a rushed legislative amendment, piggybacked on unrelated legislation, that changed the provisions which allowed citizens to be informed whether they had been under surveillance (provided such surveillance had been terminated), if their surveillance had taken place for reasons of “national security”. In other words, up to that point, ADAE (the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy) could, following permission from a prosecutor, inform a citizen who requested it that they had been under surveillance in the past, which meant that there was at least a theoretical possibility to seek redress in the courts, if one believed they had been targeted unfairly. Since the law changed, it is sufficient for EYP to claim reasons of “national security” and ADAE cannot divulge anything. What is more, the law applies retroactively, so all past surveillance is now effectively beyond scrutiny.

 

Members of the ADAE board, albeit in a non-official capacity, had protested at the time and had pointed out that such legislation contravenes the European Convention of Human Rights, as it practically deprives victims of illegal surveillance of access to due process. There is no indication that the government even considered their protests.

This statement was coordinated by the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism which tracks, monitors and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States, Candidate Countries and Ukraine.

From migrants’ rights to Predator

In November 2021, Efimerida ton Syntakton, a prominent left-wing daily, published a report which revealed that EYP had targeted numerous individuals for surveillance, apparently without legitimate reason. Among them, there were participants in anti-vaccination rallies, but also a civil servant who supported migrant workers’ rights, a lawyer who defended an immigrant in court, and a journalist who was trying to locate an unaccompanied minor in a refugee camp.

 

When Stavros Malichoudis, the journalist in question, recognised himself in the report, Solomon, the independent website where he works, published a scathing article, asking: “In which system of government does the state record the movements of journalists?” No justification for the surveillance was ever made public.

 

In December 2021, in a seemingly unrelated development, two reports, one by Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto and one by Meta (Facebook’s parent company), pointed out the threat of Predator, a new spyware developed by so-called “cyber-mercenaries” of the global surveillance-for-hire industry. Predator closely resembles Pegasus, a similar spyware tool implicated in illegal hackings across the world since 2016.

 

The reports did not exactly rock the Greek mainstream media’s news cycle. However, one independent, investigative website, Inside Story, picked up on the fact that the reports mentioned the possibility of Predator “customers” in Greece. It followed up on the reports and published a story showing that a corporate structure had been established in Greece to market Predator, and also most disquietingly that dozens of fake urls had been created to resemble existent Greek webpages, in an apparent phishing set-up for potential Predator targets. Despite the obvious implications for the security of communications, there was no official response from competent authorities.

 

A private citizens’ affair

Inside Story’s next feature, however, in April 2022,  launched the torrent of revelations that have been termed the “Greek Watergate” — a title repeated by no less an authority on the matter than The Washington Post. It showed that investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis’s phone, analysed by Citizen Lab, had been hacked with Predator, the first such confirmed case in Europe. It also showed that Koukakis, alerted by a source that his communications might have been monitored, had submitted a request to ADAE to be informed if he had been a surveillance target in the past. ADAE replied that “no event that contravenes relevant legislation has been noted”. Inside Story pointed out that the “relevant legislation”, which could have compelled ADAE to inform Koukakis of his surveillance, had been hastily amended.

 

The publication provoked the first reaction from the government, which amounted to no more than a dismissal: the government spokesman Yiannis Oikonomou simply said there should be an investigation if “one private citizen had another private citizen under surveillance”.

 

The “private citizen” argument, though, was immediately questioned when, a few days after Inside Story, another independent investigative website, Reporters United, published a report that proved that EYP had Koukakis under surveillance, citing “national security”, under its “normal” procedure, for three months in 2020. EYP broke off the surveillance on the very day that Koukakis filed his request with ADAE. His phone was hacked with Predator immediately after that.

 

The government neither confirmed nor denied the “normal” surveillance of Koukakis by EYP, following the same pattern it had established a year earlier with Malichoudis, but it continued to deny any involvement with Predator. Moreover, EAD (the National Transparency Authority, created by the New Democracy government), which had been tasked with investigating Koukakis’s phone hacking, issued a report absolving the government of any wrongdoing, although it failed to even consider important evidence. This is not the only time that EAD has been criticised for incomplete and pro-government investigations. Its report on illegal pushbacks of refugees had met with international ridicule when it found no wrongdoing by the Greek authorities, based solely on the testimony of the police and coastguard.

 

Denials and resignations

Barely a few days after EAD had cleared the government, Nikos Androulakis revealed that according to the EU Parliament’s security experts, there had been an attempt to hack his phone with Predator. Under pressure for answers, EYP revealed in July that it had been spying on him under its “normal” procedure, for reasons of “national security”, during the time he was a candidate for PASOK’s leadership. This surveillance had taken place simultaneously with the attempted Predator attack.

 

Meanwhile, the two independent outlets, Inside Story and Reporters United, had persisted with their investigations, and through a series of stories had established that EYP and the Greek police services had been in the market for spyware in the past, and that Intellexa, the company that markets Predator, was active in Greece and was indirectly connected, through a web of corporate entities, with government contracts. The more recent of these reports, by Reporters United, also published in Efimerida ton Syntakton, indirectly tied some of these corporate entities to Grigoris Dimitriadis, the general secretary of the Prime Minister’s office.

 

Initially, Dimitriadis had defended his business activities as legal, and had denied any involvement with Predator or related corporate entities. After a few days, though, under the weight of the revelations, both Grigoris Dimitriadis and Panayiotis Kontoleon, the director of EYP, submitted their resignations. Dimitriadis, however, followed his resignation with lawsuits against Reporters United, Efimerida ton Syntakton and Thanasis Koukakis, demanding exorbitant sums for alleged defamation.

 

It is worth noting that during the four months since Inside Story’s revelation that Koukakis’s phone had been hacked with Predator, there has barely been a mention of the affair in Greek mainstream media, whose overwhelming pro-government bias we have analysed in a previous article. It has only been since Androulakis made the attempted Predator attack on his phone public that most mainstream media saw fit to cover the scandal to a limited degree — presumably because he is a centrist politician rather than an independent journalist.

Despite mounting pressure, the Greek government is still refusing to provide substantive answers regarding the revelations that two journalists and an MEP and leader of an opposition party have been targeted for surveillance by EYP (the Greek Intelligence Service), as well as by yet unknown operators using the spyware “Predator”.

The affair concerns two distinct operations. The first is EYP’s spying on two journalists, Stavros Malichoudis, a reporter with independent outlet Solomon, and Thanasis Koukakis, a freelance journalist investigating banking and business stories; and also Nikos Androulakis, an MEP and leader of opposition party PASOK. These surveillance operations were carried out through EYP’s “normal” procedure for listening in on a target’s communications, following approval by a prosecutor. The second was the hacking of Koukakis’s and Androulakis’s mobile phones with Predator, a spyware tool that is able to access even encrypted services.

Although the surveillance of journalists and political opponents by state services hardly seems like the hallmark of democratic governance, the first procedure can be legal, not only for “national security” reasons, but also in cases of serious crime like drug smuggling or human trafficking. The legal framework in Greece, however, lacks any provision for technically supervising the use of spyware, which in practice makes it illegal.

No conclusive link between the two operations has been proven — yet. The fact, though, that they took place one right after the other (in the case of Koukakis) or simultaneously (in the case of Androulakis) raises reasonable suspicions that they are related. Further suspicions about both the use of spyware and the ostensibly legal procedure used against two journalists and a politician are raised not only by the Greek government’s handling of the affair, but also a number of key decisions it has made in the last three years.

Legislating against transparency

Soon after being elected in July 2019, the New Democracy government implemented new legislation in two crucial areas regarding the intelligence service: first, it brought it under the direct purview of the office of the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis; second, it amended the required qualifications for the position of director of intelligence, so it could appoint the prime minister’s favourite, Panayiotis Kontoleon, who fell short of the previous criteria.

Less than two years later, in March 2021, it made another controversial move: it introduced a rushed legislative amendment, piggybacked on unrelated legislation, that changed the provisions which allowed citizens to be informed whether they had been under surveillance (provided such surveillance had been terminated), if their surveillance had taken place for reasons of “national security”. In other words, up to that point, ADAE (the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy) could, following permission from a prosecutor, inform a citizen who requested it that they had been under surveillance in the past, which meant that there was at least a theoretical possibility to seek redress in the courts, if one believed they had been targeted unfairly. Since the law changed, it is sufficient for EYP to claim reasons of “national security” and ADAE cannot divulge anything. What is more, the law applies retroactively, so all past surveillance is now effectively beyond scrutiny.

Members of the ADAE board, albeit in a non-official capacity, had protested at the time and had pointed out that such legislation contravenes the European Convention of Human Rights, as it practically deprives victims of illegal surveillance of access to due process. There is no indication that the government even considered their protests.

From migrants’ rights to Predator

In November 2021, Efimerida ton Syntakton, a prominent left-wing daily, published a report which revealed that EYP had targeted numerous individuals for surveillance, apparently without legitimate reason. Among them, there were participants in anti-vaccination rallies, but also a civil servant who supported migrant workers’ rights, a lawyer who defended an immigrant in court, and a journalist who was trying to locate an unaccompanied minor in a refugee camp.

When Stavros Malichoudis, the journalist in question, recognised himself in the report, Solomon, the independent website where he works, published a scathing article, asking: “In which system of government does the state record the movements of journalists?” No justification for the surveillance was ever made public.

In December 2021, in a seemingly unrelated development, two reports, one by Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto and one by Meta (Facebook’s parent company), pointed out the threat of Predator, a new spyware developed by so-called “cyber-mercenaries” of the global surveillance-for-hire industry. Predator closely resembles Pegasus, a similar spyware tool implicated in illegal hackings across the world since 2016.

The reports did not exactly rock the Greek mainstream media’s news cycle. However, one independent, investigative website, Inside Story, picked up on the fact that the reports mentioned the possibility of Predator “customers” in Greece. It followed up on the reports and published a story showing that a corporate structure had been established in Greece to market Predator, and also most disquietingly that dozens of fake urls had been created to resemble existent Greek webpages, in an apparent phishing set-up for potential Predator targets. Despite the obvious implications for the security of communications, there was no official response from competent authorities.

A private citizens’ affair

Inside Story’s next feature, however, in April 2022,  launched the torrent of revelations that have been termed the “Greek Watergate” — a title repeated by no less an authority on the matter than The Washington Post. It showed that investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis’s phone, analysed by Citizen Lab, had been hacked with Predator, the first such confirmed case in Europe. It also showed that Koukakis, alerted by a source that his communications might have been monitored, had submitted a request to ADAE to be informed if he had been a surveillance target in the past. ADAE replied that “no event that contravenes relevant legislation has been noted”. Inside Story pointed out that the “relevant legislation”, which could have compelled ADAE to inform Koukakis of his surveillance, had been hastily amended.

The publication provoked the first reaction from the government, which amounted to no more than a dismissal: the government spokesman Yiannis Oikonomou simply said there should be an investigation if “one private citizen had another private citizen under surveillance”.

The “private citizen” argument, though, was immediately questioned when, a few days after Inside Story, another independent investigative website, Reporters United, published a report that proved that EYP had Koukakis under surveillance, citing “national security”, under its “normal” procedure, for three months in 2020. EYP broke off the surveillance on the very day that Koukakis filed his request with ADAE. His phone was hacked with Predator immediately after that.

The government neither confirmed nor denied the “normal” surveillance of Koukakis by EYP, following the same pattern it had established a year earlier with Malichoudis, but it continued to deny any involvement with Predator. Moreover, EAD (the National Transparency Authority, created by the New Democracy government), which had been tasked with investigating Koukakis’s phone hacking, issued a report absolving the government of any wrongdoing, although it failed to even consider important evidence. This is not the only time that EAD has been criticised for incomplete and pro-government investigations. Its report on illegal pushbacks of refugees had met with international ridicule when it found no wrongdoing by the Greek authorities, based solely on the testimony of the police and coastguard.

Denials and resignations

Barely a few days after EAD had cleared the government, Nikos Androulakis revealed that according to the EU Parliament’s security experts, there had been an attempt to hack his phone with Predator. Under pressure for answers, EYP revealed in July that it had been spying on him under its “normal” procedure, for reasons of “national security”, during the time he was a candidate for PASOK’s leadership. This surveillance had taken place simultaneously with the attempted Predator attack.

Meanwhile, the two independent outlets, Inside Story and Reporters United, had persisted with their investigations, and through a series of stories had established that EYP and the Greek police services had been in the market for spyware in the past, and that Intellexa, the company that markets Predator, was active in Greece and was indirectly connected, through a web of corporate entities, with government contracts. The more recent of these reports, by Reporters United, also published in Efimerida ton Syntakton, indirectly tied some of these corporate entities to Grigoris Dimitriadis, the general secretary of the Prime Minister’s office.

Initially, Dimitriadis had defended his business activities as legal, and had denied any involvement with Predator or related corporate entities. After a few days, though, under the weight of the revelations, both Grigoris Dimitriadis and Panayiotis Kontoleon, the director of EYP, submitted their resignations. Dimitriadis, however, followed his resignation with lawsuits against Reporters United, Efimerida ton Syntakton and Thanasis Koukakis, demanding exorbitant sums for alleged defamation.

It is worth noting that during the four months since Inside Story’s revelation that Koukakis’s phone had been hacked with Predator, there has barely been a mention of the affair in Greek mainstream media, whose overwhelming pro-government bias we have analysed in a previous article. It has only been since Androulakis made the attempted Predator attack on his phone public that most mainstream media saw fit to cover the scandal to a limited degree — presumably because he is a centrist politician rather than an independent journalist.

A televised smokescreen

The prime minister’s attempt to contain the scandal by giving a televised address to the nation failed to provide answers to pressing questions. Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke only of the surveillance of Androulakis, which he said was legal, but “politically wrong”. Despite the EYP being under his personal purview, he said he did not know about it, and would never have allowed it if he did. Which begs the question: in what sense would the prime minister have prevented a legal action for political reasons?

The prime minister announced vague measures to bolster the transparency of EYP’s activities, “without hindering its mission”. But he said nothing about the legality of the surveillance of journalists — in fact he didn’t mention them at all — or about the free hand that “national security” had lent the intelligence service to monitor his political opponent. Above all, he said nothing about Predator, despite mounting evidence that the spyware hacks are not unrelated to EYP’s ostensibly legal procedures.

The government’s unwillingness to really uphold transparency is exacerbated by the fact that the investigation ordered by the Supreme Court prosecutor, Isidoros Doyiakos, concerns only the circumstances under which EYP’s classified activities became public, and not the legality of the activities themselves.

While the scandal is increasingly unnerving EU authorities and is being covered by media across the world, the government has reluctantly agreed to shorten the Parliament’s summer recess, in order to allow for a thorough parliamentary discussion.

Surveillance for reasons of “national security” in Greece has increased to 15,000 orders last year, according to ADAE’s records. In combination with the knowledge that at least some of these orders concern journalists, lawyers, pro-migrant rights activists and politicians, this staggering rise truly prompts the question if Greece is sliding back to its undemocratic past. Given the current government’s track record of withholding answers, it is no small consolation that independent journalists are still digging.

This article was coordinated by the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism which tracks, monitors and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and candidate countries.