Vodafone head testifies on phone-tap affair (Greece: U.S. Involved?)

[hunter]

A common opinion in Greece seems to be that the CIA or similar U.S. agency tapped the cellphones of Greek government officials and others because the United States did not trust Greek security arangements for the Olympics. There is also a suspicious suicide here.

The CEO of Vodafone Greece George Koronias told a Parliamentary investigation on Thursday that Vodafone had at no time purchased the software used to carry out the illegal phone taps through its digital systems, while stressing that the people responsible had to have extremely high technical expertise and a deep knowledge of Ericsson's programming environment.

Koronias was testifying before Parliament's Institutions and Transparency Committee regarding the illegal phone-tapping software secretly installed in the company's systems, which had monitored calls by highly-placed Greek officials - including the prime minister - for over a year.

During his testimony, Koronias stressed that Vodafone had "not requested, not ordered and not received" the legal low-phone interception programme developed by Ericsson, which the phone-tappers had managed to activate in order to monitor the roughly 100 mobile phones that were under surveillance.

He said that the low-phone interception programme was added to Ericsson systems at the request of its customers after the September 11 attacks, but underlined the costly service had not been purchased by Vodafone.

http://www.ana.gr/anaweb/user/showplain?maindoc=4037837&maindocimg=4036819&service=10

[rumpel]

1. Is this a case of US agent infiltration?

Both companies are headquartered outside of the US. The death of the 30 some year old definitely hints at being suicided, how many of these cases have we already had, from journalists to investigators.
The greed that drives these companies to gobble up everything in sight and their backdoor deals with politicians seems to be coming back to haunt them.
This is worse than the spread of the birdflu, isn't it.

I would not be surprised the "ghost software" exists here.

Vodafone = based in Newbury, Berkshire England

The Group has ownership interests in 27 countries across 5 continents. In addition, the Group has Partner Networks in a further 31 countries.
Based on ownership interests at 31 December 2005, the Group had 179.3 million proportionate customers in its subsidiaries, joint ventures, associates and investments. At 31 December 2005, there were 510.2 million total venture customers.

http://www.vodafone.com/article_wide/0,3041,CATEGORY_ID%253D306%2526LANGUAGE_ID%253D0%2526CONTENT_ID%253D230772,00.html

Ericsson in brief
Ericsson is a world-leading provider of telecommunications equipment and related services to mobile and fixed network operators globally. Over 1,000 networks in 140 countries utilize our network equipment and 40 percent of all mobile calls are made through our systems. We are one of the few companies worldwide that can offer end-to-end solutions for all major mobile communication standards.

Through our Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications joint venture we offer a range of mobile devices, including those supporting multimedia applications and other services allowing richer communication.

We invest heavily in R&D and actively promote open standards and systems. Also reflecting our ongoing commitment to technological leadership, we have one of the industry's most comprehensive intellectual property portfolio containing over 16,000 patents with an additional 15,000 patent applications pending approval by various patent authorities.

http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/index.shtml

Our origins date back to 1876. Our headquarters are located in Stockholm, Sweden.

[hunter]

2. Most terrorists quickly figured out their cell phones could be tapped.

It's taking the rest of us a bit longer.

[Stockholm]

3. Vodaphone owns 45 percent of

Verizon Wireless (US company). The other 55 percent is owned by Verizon Communications (fmr Bell Atlantic and GTE).

[seafan]

4. Interesting tidbit here:

snip

Not all of <SAIC's> surveillance work is for the United States military The company has installed a location-based Global Positioning System tracking service for BellSouth's 14,000 installation and maintenance vehicles and today its latest contract is to run security for the upcoming Athens Olympics from a zeppelin that will hover over the city.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=17

[hunter]

5. Wow, a zeppelin...

"Can you hear me now?"