The unsaid truths of the tapping case
We get used to everything in the end – on the one hand the surfeit of information we are bombarded with on some topics and, on the other, the distinct impression that we are only being shown a small chink of the truth. As a result, we have started to regard all developments in the phone-tapping scandal without great interest or surprise and without the outbursts of rage one would expect. About a week ago the president of the Communications Privacy Protection Authority (ADAE) made a solemn declaration before Parliament’s transparency committee that he knew whether phone-tapping software had been planted manually (by a Vodafone official) or electronically (by an external actor) but that he did not want to say. But there was no reaction whatsoever to Andreas Lambrinopoulos’s condescending response, neither a public outcry nor any move by a prosecutor to oblige him to speak. After all, it is the ADAE president’s duty to respond to the parliamentary committee in question. By concealing such a significant piece of information, he is undermining the investigation that the judiciary is supposedly carrying out into this affair. But this is not the only example of covering up. Vodafone’s CEO Giorgos Koronias also publicly announced that he did not immediately report his discovery that phone-tapping software had been planted in his company’s system due to «reasons of national security.» In view of the above, it is quite natural for us to feel that the wool is being pulled over our eyes; and it is equally natural for us to wonder how investigations into this scandal would have progressed had the ADAE been informed about the discovery of the phone-tapping software without a year-long delay.
