[5] In August the government passed a legislative amendment to remove holding a university degree from required qualifications for the head of the EYP and to enable them appoint Panagiotis Kontoleon as its chief, despite Mitsotakis having denied any laws would be changed.
The recipients included former EU Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, Regional Governor of Attica Giorgos Patoulis, Hellenic Police chief Michalis Karamalakis and the prosecutor responsible for EYP Vassiliki Vlachou.
[15] The case reached media spotlight when opposition politician Nikos Androulakis revealed in July 2022 that there was an attempted hack of his mobile phone.
It was later discovered the violation of the privacy of his communications through the Predator software that had infected his mobile phone,[18] on 28 March 2022, after an audit carried out on his behalf by the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto.
On 26 July 2022, Androulakis filed a complaint to the Supreme Court for personal data breach, as the presence of a link related to the illegal Predator software was detected on his mobile phone.
In July 2022, the Special Permanent Committee on Institutions and Transparency of the Parliament was convened where the Head of the NIS, Panagiotis Kontoleon and the president of Communications Privacy Authority (AADE), Christos Rammos, attended.
A few days later, EFSYN published an investigation linking the then General Secretary of the Prime Minister, Grigoris Dimitriadis, to the company that supplies the predator software in Greece.
[24] On 8 December, Mitsotakis ardently refuted in parliament the allegations that he could have ordered a surveillance of the Minister of Labour Kostis Hatzidakis, or of the Chief of the Hellenic Armed Forces, Konstantinos Floros.
[25][26] On 16 December, it was revealed that ADAE, a Greek independent authority safeguarding the privacy of telecommunications, had confirmed the surveillance of MEP Giorgos Kyrtsos and investigative journalist Tasos Telloglou after carrying out an audit.
[27] On 24 January 2023, responding to a question by Alexis Tsipras regarding six specific individuals, including Kostis Hatzidakis and Konstantinos Floros, ADAE officially confirmed that all of them had been under surveillance by the National Intelligence Service, a department under Mitsotakis' direct control.
[28] According to The New York Times, Greece's national intelligence agency allegedly wiretapped and hacked the phone of Artemis Seaford, a former security policy manager at Meta.
[38] The targeting of journalists during the course of the wiretapping scandal led Greece to fall from the 70th to the 108th place on the 2022 Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking, the lowest position of any European country, with it remaining so as of 2023.
In October 2023 they asked the independent authority responsible for privacy (ADAE) to cross-check whether the 92 people targeted with Predator had also been surveilled by the country’s intelligence service (EYP).
Following their second request to ADAE on 20 October they were removed from the case three days later, by an order of Supreme Court Prosecutor Georgia Adeilini, who cited delays in their investigation.