The trial for the wiretapping case continued with witness testimonies today, while the first five new witnesses summoned by the court failed to appear in the courtroom. As announced by the president of the Athens Single-Member Misdemeanor Court, the court was unable to locate the witnesses and therefore cannot impose fines for failure to testify. Tomorrow, five more new witnesses have been summoned by the court.
Wiretapping case: Cybercrime unit officer’s testimony
Police officer Pavlos Kolovos from the Cybercrime Division testified in court. “I am a police officer in cybercrime, a computer engineer. I dealt with investigating the name of an internet domain. I later investigated information from a publication. The name is blogspot.edwlio5. What we’re looking for is who bought it from the registrar. We’re searching for which company provides it. This information is searched with special tools and is accessible to anyone. I found that the name is provided by an American giant company for domain names, which deals with domain name management, especially American ones. Whoever buys it can use whatever sub-names they want” the witness testified.
President: In your testimony you say that to obtain details of who bought the name, a judicial assistance request must be sent. Do you know if a judicial assistance request was sent?
Witness: I don’t have an answer to that.
The witness also said he dealt with the case one more time, again following a prosecutor’s order, after a newspaper publication about 500 domain names that may be involved. “I remember a lead had emerged. An order had been made for domain.gr.com. I don’t remember how it emerged, the domain name is a company that provides names” the witness said, adding “I concluded that these were subdomains of domain.gr.com. I couldn’t determine whether they had been used for targeting“. “If a mobile phone is checked and communicates with a server, the IP could be traced. Generally, perpetrators are one step ahead” the witness said, adding that “the malicious software doesn’t always operate the same way.“
Journalist Nikolaos Leontopoulos from Reporters United also testified in court. “Christmas 2021 we started dealing with the case. The first publication was January 2022. I’m interested in the institutional aspect of the surveillance and wiretapping story. We entered the case with my colleague, Thodoros Chondrogianno, somewhat unsuspectingly, when we realized the government had changed the law regarding the right to information for people surveilled by the National Intelligence Service. In March 2021, ADAE officials came out and said the law was unconstitutional. We learned that important political figures, when they learned about the law, considered something was happening. We had no idea about Koukakis then. We understood that to change the law retroactively, they must want to hide some surveillance. We know that important figures made representations to the Prime Minister and Dimitriadis not to pass this law and weren’t heard” the witness said.
The witness then explained how their investigation evolved. “We found Koukakis after three months, in April 2022 we published that Koukakis was being surveilled by the National Intelligence Service, and then Androulakis emerged and we understood the case was very important. We published articles about Dimitriadis, Lavrano, Bitzios. We reached August when the case exploded.
In Greece we’re essentially two small media outlets dealing with the case, and competitively between us. In June we managed to document a network of companies with Dimitriadis in the middle connected to Bitzios and Lavrano. The first publication is about connections, how Dimitriadis connects with businesses linked to illegal software. Apart from extrajudicial notices, we received lawsuits from Dimitriadis. In both cases he filed against us, we were acquitted at first instance” the journalist explained.
“The Prime Minister’s secretary-general appeared to be buying a company connected in many ways to Mr. Bitzios while simultaneously selling to another company connected to Lavrano and Bitzios. It’s strange how he relates this way to the two businessmen” the journalist said.
President: Did you have contact with them?
Witness: Yes, we tried to have contact from the first moment within journalistic ethics. Later we contacted Lavrano and we must be the only ones who sat with him. The interesting thing was that there were companies with people who don’t exist, fake people. We had a lengthy conversation with his lawyer and published part of it in the article “all the identities of Yannis Lavranos”.
Mr. Lavranos denied being the person who runs Krikel.
Regarding the Panagiotopulos-Lavranos trip to Israel, revealed by Vasilis Lambropoulos, the witness explained that “in our attempt to document if the trip happened, we found a senior armed forces officer who confirmed a Panagiotopulos-Lavranos trip to Israel took place. Our source participated in the trip. He told us Lavranos responded to him. It’s strange that Lavranos went on this trip.“
The journalist explained that “we have enough indications that if you put them all together, they’re not coincidences” and added “You have people lying. Dimitriadis tells the investigative committee he doesn’t know Bitzios and months later at the Beca committee a lawyer testifies that Dimitriadis asked him to represent Bitzios. For me, another factor that makes me feel safe reaching such conclusions is the exports case. We know Intellexa used Greece to export software to strange countries because Sudan and Madagascar are strange countries.”
The trial continues tomorrow.
