When the wiretapping scandal broke out, amid “lawful interceptions” and illegal spyware, the so-called grocer’s theory emerged. According to the proponents of this school of thought, it was only logical that the list of those intercepted or infected would include politicians, military officers, businesspeople and journalists. What would state services want with Mr. Giorgos, who opened his grocery shop every morning? To find out, at the moment Mrs. Maria was buying two kilos of oranges, the neighborhood news? No—some news was naturally of interest, and other gossip was not. The kind of news that makes people, however powerful they may be and whatever their ambitions, vulnerable.
Vulnerability—and this is hardly any state secret—is usually located in private life. Devotees of the grocer’s theory could recall a politician who, during his years in power, had at his disposal all the technological means of the time to monitor his lovestruck rival. The system—by the standards of that era—was so advanced that when the phone rang in the lover’s house, a connected device would ring simultaneously in his own home. He only had to pick up his receiver as well. Not to learn of his opponent’s terrible plans, but simply to amuse himself with his telephone embraces.
This story, set in the era of the “chief priests” Tombra and Mavrikis, shows that wiretapping has a past. Amusing—provided you were not the secretly enamored one. Certainly also dark. Did it continue? The moment the question is raised, the latest scandal in the series is automatically relativized. “These things always happened.” Even more so, “they happen elsewhere too.” When European ministers leave their mobile phones outside the room during meetings without much ceremony, they do not do so merely out of caution. They do it because they are realists. And here, in a country where even the secret services do not keep secrets, journalists have been informed by their sources that at some point they were under surveillance. They are realistic enough to know they were not being monitored for “national security reasons,” as the law requires with the signature of two or three prosecutors. They were monitored because the “bugs” wanted to know what they knew. So how do former officeholders “now act as if they have fallen from the clouds”?
In the same realistic spirit, a senior government minister has placed in his office a box that looks like a jewelry case but is more than that. Or rather, it is “smarter”: the box produces noise at the appropriate frequency so that when mobile phones are placed inside, interception of conversations is impossible—even by sophisticated software such as Predator.
More realism: according to a certain theory of communication, the interests of public opinion change roughly like television channels with a remote control. Based on this theory, one day the “end of wiretapping” was announced. The polls showed it, and in a studio this qualitative element was interpreted vividly by another government minister: “Do you want me to tell you the truth about the wiretappings?” he shot back at the journalist who was bombarding him with questions. “Yes!” she replied eagerly. The minister pressed the button of revelation: “The truth is that nobody cares.”
Does all this mean that the latest scandal in the series will be swallowed forever by the void of indifference, or simply downed like a shot because “these things always happened”? Realism does not allow such certainties. One day, a low-ranking judge may strike the first brick with a decision, and no one will know where the domino effect will stop—not even those caught with the bug in their ear. It happens rarely. But it happened in recent days.
The ruling of the Single-Member Court of First Instance that convicted the “four” showed the limits of the grocer’s theory and all its realistic offshoots. It remains to be seen whether it will also show the limits of the—not so realistic—theory of out-of-court settlements. For now, however, many are listening.
