The Greek secret services have launched the use of an extremely modern technology, created in Germany, tracking telephone conversations to help in the war with organized crime and terrorism. The new Big Brother system is the one that helped revealing the abduction of the Greek shipping magnate Panaiotis Panagopoulos and the international channel for women trafficking in 20 Athenian brothels. The German “Legal tapping system” costs ?7mil and creates revolution in public security being able to “catch” useful information from the bottom of the criminal world. It substitutes for old-time police methods and practices proved to be useless for decades now.

Recently the main office of the Greek police at the “Aleksandra” boulevard looks like the movie set of a mob-series from the darkest years of Chicago or the Sicilian mafia. Regularly, the policemen are bringing in groups of mobsters, god-fathers, pimps, recidivists, assassinators and mere criminals. Even the prejudiced spectator can see that something important had changed about the work of the Greek police. Years long policemen were complaining that criminals are always a few steps ahead because of their new technologies. Today things finally change. As a warning line, tapped in a conversation from the prison says: “the friend has a machine and listens to all kinds of music.”

The new technology upsets not only the criminals but their “connections” as well- all the people in the police and juridical circles helping them escape punishment for decades, in exchange of a certain “fee.” According to the initial findings, only the two cases just mentioned involve prison directors, businessmen, polititians, well-known faces from the juridical system, even journalists.