Greek wiretapping case 2004–05

The phones tapped included those of the Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and members of his family, the Mayor of Athens, Dora Bakoyannis, most phones of the top officers at the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for Public Order, members of the ruling party, ranking members of the opposition Panhellenic Socialist Movement party (PASOK), the Hellenic Navy General Staff, the previous Minister of Defense and one phone of a locally hired Greek American employee of the American Embassy.

"[5] The leader of the PASOK socialist opposition George Papandreou said that the Greek government itself had pointed towards the US as responsible for the wiretaps by giving up the zone of listening range, in which the US embassy was included.

[7] The incident was one of the biggest political scandals of recent Greek history—tapping mobile phones of members of the cabinet, the Prime Minister, and hundreds of others.

[8] The authorities and the media strongly feel that the death of Network Planning Manager for Vodafone Greece Kostas Tsalikidis was associated with his position in the company.

[10] According to the head of Greece's intelligence service, Ioannis Korantis: "From the moment that the software was shut down, the string broke that could have lead [sic] us to who was behind this.

Family and friends believe there are strong indications he was the person who first discovered that highly sophisticated software had been secretly inserted into the Vodafone network.

[3] Tsalikidis had been planning for a while to quit his Vodafone job but told his fiancée not long before he died that it had become "a matter of life or death" that he leave, says the family's lawyer, Themis Sofos.

[12] In November 2007, press reports in Greece quoted the Tsalikidis family attorney, Themistokles Sofos, as saying they had commenced legal action against Vodafone, "suspect[ing] he was poisoned".

[4] Kostas Tsalikidis (Κώστας Τσαλικίδης; July 23, 1966 – March 9, 2005) was Vodafone Greece's Network Planning Manager when he died at the age of 39 during the wiretapping case, in what appeared to be a suicide, but later was found to be a murder.

From 2001 until his death, he was responsible for all planning activities for the GSM, GPRS and UMTS Vodafone Panafon Core Network (Design, Architecture, Dimensioning, Ordering, Rollout, Interconnect, Optimisation).

Tsalikidis received his diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The investigation into the matter was further hampered when Greek law enforcement officials began to make accusations at both Vodafone and Ericsson, which forced experts on the defensive.

[22] On October 19, 2007, Vodafone Greece was again fined €19 million by EETT, the national telecommunications regulator, for alleged breach of privacy rules.

The key evidence of complicity was that out of the 14 anonymous prepaid mobile phones used for the interception, three had been purchased by the same person at the same time as a fourth one.

With a sim card registered to the US Embassy, it also called two telephone numbers in Ellicott City and Catonsville, Maryland, both NSA bedroom communities.