Μake us preferred on Google A serving senior officer of the Greek National Intelligence Service (EYP), who was himself targeted with the Predator software, has filed a criminal complaint against Tal Dilian and the three other convicted defendants over his surveillance, asking that the case be investigated as espionage against the country.
The complaint, lodged Tuesday with the Athens first-instance prosecutor’s office, is the first in which a serving EYP officer whose phone was infected with the spyware asks the judiciary to examine the affair as espionage, on the grounds of the sensitive material his post required him to handle.
The complainant, Yiannis Papadopoulos, filed the report alongside his lawyer, Apostolos Pontas, against four people convicted at first instance for the Predator surveilance scandal: two Greeks, Felix Bitzios, an Intellexa executive, and Yiannis Lavranos, who owned the Greek security firm that bought Intellexa’s Predator spyware; and two Israelis, Tal Dilian, the founder of Intellexa and a former commander of an elite Israeli intelligence unit, and his ex-wife and business partner Sara Hamou. The complaint charges a series of felonies tied to breaching the confidentiality of communications and to forming a criminal organization, and it asks the courts to investigate the commission of what it calls the exceptionally grave crime of espionage against the state.
Pontas said the complaint marks a turning point, widening the case at its core: once a serving intelligence officer asks for the affair to be investigated as espionage, he argued, it becomes a matter of national security. Papadopoulos argues that his case stands apart from those of other Predator victims. His post, he says, gives him access to top-secret classified material, and a leak of that material to outsiders, let alone to private individuals, would threaten national security and constitute espionage.
He is also asking prosecutors to open a full cycle of inquiry to expose the entire network of surveillance collaborators and identify everyone who took part in it or assisted, whether as instigators, co-perpetrators or accomplices.
