For years, the Greek government denied any involvement in the surveillance of journalists, politicians, and business leaders using Predator, one of the most invasive commercial spyware tools ever deployed in Europe. Now the man convicted of running the operation is pointing the finger directly at Athens.
Felix Bitzios, the Greek businessman convicted in connection with the Predator spyware operation, has made statements strongly suggesting that senior figures in the Greek government directed the hacking of dozens of phones belonging to prominent individuals in the country. His remarks, reported by TechCrunch, represent the most direct accusation yet from an insider in one of Europe’s most damaging surveillance scandals — one that has shaken public trust in democratic institutions across the continent and drawn sharp scrutiny from the European Parliament.
The implications are enormous. If corroborated, Bitzios’s claims would confirm what investigators, journalists, and victims have long suspected: that the Greek state itself was the client behind a spyware campaign targeting its own citizens.
From Denial to Exposure: How the Predator Scandal Unraveled
The story begins in 2022, when a cascade of revelations rocked Greek politics. Thanasis Koukakis, a financial journalist, and Nikos Androulakis, then the leader of Greece’s socialist PASOK party and a member of the European Parliament, both discovered their phones had been targeted with Predator spyware. The tool, developed by the North Macedonian firm Cytrox and marketed by the Intellexa alliance — a loose consortium of surveillance companies with ties across Europe, Israel, and beyond — was capable of turning a smartphone into a real-time surveillance device. Microphone, camera, messages, location data. Everything.
The revelations didn’t stop there. Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto research group that has become the global authority on commercial spyware forensics, confirmed infections on multiple devices. The Greek government’s initial response was a familiar playbook: deny, deflect, and minimize. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis acknowledged that Greece’s national intelligence service, the EYP, had conducted lawful wiretapping of Koukakis but denied any connection to Predator. The head of the EYP resigned. So did the prime minister’s chief of staff, who also happened to be his nephew.
But no one in government admitted to deploying Predator. The official line held: the state had nothing to do with the spyware.
That line is now crumbling.
Bitzios’s statements, even if couched in the careful language of a man navigating legal jeopardy, amount to a direct challenge to the government’s narrative. According to TechCrunch’s reporting, he has suggested that the targets were not chosen by a rogue private operator acting alone but rather at the direction of state officials. The number of victims — reportedly dozens — further undermines the theory that this was an isolated or freelance operation. Spyware of Predator’s caliber costs significant sums per target. Someone was paying. Someone was ordering.
The question of who authorized and funded the operation has haunted the scandal from the start. Greek prosecutors have pursued criminal cases, and Bitzios’s conviction marked a rare instance of legal accountability in the commercial spyware industry. But convicting an intermediary is one thing. Establishing that a sitting government directed an illegal surveillance campaign against journalists and opposition politicians is something else entirely — a matter with constitutional, criminal, and geopolitical dimensions.
Greece is hardly alone in facing allegations of spyware abuse. The Pegasus Project, a landmark investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories and a consortium of international media outlets in 2021, revealed that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware had been used by governments around the world to target journalists, activists, lawyers, and heads of state. Spain’s use of Pegasus against Catalan independence figures sparked its own political crisis. Poland’s PiS government was accused of deploying Pegasus against opposition leaders. Hungary under Viktor Orbán faced similar allegations.
But the Greek case is distinctive for several reasons. First, it involved Predator rather than Pegasus, exposing the breadth of the commercial spyware market beyond NSO Group. The Intellexa alliance, co-founded by former Israeli intelligence officer Tal Dilian, operated across multiple jurisdictions, making legal accountability extraordinarily difficult. Second, Greece is a member of the European Union and NATO, a country that presents itself as a pillar of Western democratic governance. And third, the emerging testimony from Bitzios — a convicted figure with firsthand operational knowledge — provides a kind of evidence that most spyware scandals never produce.
The European Parliament took the threat seriously enough to establish a dedicated committee of inquiry, known as PEGA, which investigated the use of Pegasus and equivalent spyware by EU member states. Its 2023 report was damning. The committee found that Greece had used Predator to spy on individuals in ways that violated fundamental rights, and it called for stronger EU-wide regulation of surveillance technology exports and domestic use. The Greek government pushed back, calling the findings politically motivated.
That pushback looks increasingly difficult to sustain.
Commercial spyware exists in a gray zone where national security claims meet human rights obligations. Governments that purchase these tools invariably invoke terrorism and serious crime as justifications. And in some cases, the tools genuinely serve those purposes. But the pattern across multiple countries — Greece, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Mexico — tells a different story. The targets are overwhelmingly journalists, political opponents, civil society figures, and lawyers. Not terrorists.
The economics of the industry reinforce this pattern. Companies like Cytrox, NSO Group, and their competitors depend on government contracts. Their products are classified as dual-use technology under EU export regulations, but enforcement has been inconsistent. The Intellexa alliance exploited jurisdictional gaps, basing different parts of its operations in Ireland, North Macedonia, Hungary, and elsewhere to avoid consolidated oversight. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Intellexa and Tal Dilian in 2024, and the Commerce Department had already placed the consortium on its entity list, restricting American companies from doing business with it. But these actions came years after the damage was done.
For the victims, the consequences are deeply personal. Journalists who were surveilled describe a chilling effect on their work — sources who won’t talk, stories that can’t be pursued, a constant awareness that someone may be listening. Koukakis, whose reporting focused on financial crime and corruption in Greece, has spoken publicly about the psychological toll. Androulakis, a sitting European Parliament member at the time of his targeting, called it an attack on democracy itself.
And they’re right. When a government surveils its own press corps and political opposition using military-grade spyware, the word for that isn’t national security. It’s authoritarianism.
Bitzios’s hints — and they remain, for now, hints rather than a full public testimony with documentary evidence — don’t resolve the scandal. But they shift the burden of proof. The Greek government can no longer simply deny involvement and point to a convicted private operator as the sole culprit. If the operator himself says the government was the client, the denials ring hollow.
What happens next depends on several factors. Greek prosecutors could pursue the chain of command further, though political will for such an investigation is uncertain under the current government. The European Parliament and European Commission could increase pressure, though the EU’s track record on holding member states accountable for surveillance abuses is mixed at best. And Bitzios himself could choose to provide more detailed testimony — or he could retreat into silence, calculating that further revelations would only deepen his own legal exposure.
The commercial spyware industry, meanwhile, continues to evolve. NSO Group has faced near-bankruptcy and ongoing litigation, including a landmark case brought by WhatsApp in the United States. But new vendors emerge constantly, many of them staffed by alumni of the same Israeli intelligence units that produced NSO and Intellexa’s founders. The demand signal from governments hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s grown, as smartphones become the primary repository of virtually every aspect of modern life.
Regulation remains the weakest link. The EU’s recast dual-use regulation, which took effect in 2021, was supposed to impose greater transparency and human rights due diligence on exports of surveillance technology. Implementation has been uneven. Member states retain significant discretion over export licensing, and there’s no centralized enforcement mechanism. The United States has been more aggressive through sanctions and entity listings, but American tools aren’t the ones being abused — American platforms are the ones being exploited.
Greece’s Predator scandal is, in many ways, a test case for whether European democracies can police themselves. The technology is available. The temptation is real. The legal guardrails are weak. And when a convicted spyware operator starts talking, the political class has reason to worry.
So far, the response from Athens has been silence. That silence speaks volumes.
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