Stelios Kouloglou, a Greek journalist and former member of the European Parliament, filed a criminal complaint on Monday over the hacking of his phone with Pegasus, the military-grade spyware built by Israel’s NSO Group, opening a new front in Greece’s long-running surveillance saga.
The complaint, lodged with the Athens first-instance prosecutor’s office, targets those responsible at NSO Group and covers offenses that include felonies under Greek law: breach of the confidentiality of phone and spoken communications, illegal access to data and information systems, and violation of Greece’s data protection law.
At its center is a forensic examination by the Citizen Lab, the research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. According to the complaint, that analysis showed Kouloglou’s phone “was successfully infected with Pegasus spyware on or around Oct. 21, 2022, and again on March 6 and 7, 2023.”
Both dates fell while Kouloglou was serving as a substitute member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, the body created in 2022 to investigate the use of Pegasus, Predator, and similar surveillance software across the European Union. His phone was compromised, in his own account, while he sat on the panel meant to expose that surveillance. The timing, the complaint says, coincides with “particularly significant phases” of the committee’s work, which “lends this case particular gravity.”
What the spyware could reach
In the complaint, Kouloglou describes a near-total loss of privacy. By installing and running Pegasus, he says, the perpetrators reached “nearly all of my personal data,” including communications, contacts, photographs, calendars, documents, and location data stored on or moving through the phone. That data, he says, included sensitive categories protected under law, “such as health data, but also data concerning my professional and political activity as a member of the PEGA committee.” With the ability to turn on the phone’s camera at any time, he adds, they “acquired the capacity to monitor every moment of my personal life.”
The complaint frames the intrusion as a threat beyond one person’s privacy. In argues that because the breach occured while the former MEP was working on the PEGA inquiry, the unlawful processing was “objectively capable of creating a risk to the free functioning of the democratic system.” Kouloglou claims that unlawful access to the committee’s communications and documents, could have affected “the independent exercise of parliamentary duties, the free investigation of matters of public interest, and, by extension, the functioning of democratic institutions.”
Speaking after he filed the complaint, Kouloglou said it was deeply unpleasant to have his private life watched, calling it a person’s last refuge. Surveillance, he added, does not concern a few people but every citizen, and he said he hoped the justice system would do its job.
Zacharias Kesses, Kouloglou’s attorney, said the complaint covers a string of felonies. A first-instance prosecutor has taken up the file and is reviewing it.
A separate scandal from Predator, but the same pattern
The case is distinct from the Predator scandal, which has centered on the flagship spyware of Intellexa, a company founded by former Israeli intelligence officer Tal Dilian. The malware was used to tap the phones of 87 prominent individuals, among them politicians, senior military officers, and journalists. In 2024, Greece’s Supreme Court prosecutor shelved the case against EYP, the national intelligence service, and referred four defendants to trial. They have since been convicted at first instance and have appealed.
Kesses said the complaint carries added weight because it shows that instances of unlawful surveillance continued after the Predator scandal surfaced. The Greek state, he said, remains unprotected, with individual citizens still being targeted. He also noted that Kouloglou’s case had been public for some time yet drew no official response and no investigation.
