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Thursday, March 09, 2006
(Vodafone Logo)Just heard about this this morning, not exactly the 'right' kind of publicity is it. There are rumours that the CIA were behind the bugging effort mentioned below. What a suprise !.
Greek Vodafone boss faces inquiry
By Richard Galpin
BBC News, Athens
Thursday, 9 March 2006
Vodafone mobile
The mobile phones of senior officials had been bugged. The head of mobile phone company Vodafone Greece is due to give evidence to a parliamentary committee about a phone tapping scandal.
George Koronias faces questioning for the first time since the claims, which engulfed the government, came to light. Last month, the government admitted that the mobile phones of the prime minister and other top officials had been bugged.
The tapping is said to have started before the 2004 Athens Olympics. Chief executive of Vodafone Greece, George Koronias, is likely to face a barrage of questions from members of parliament during his appearance in Athens on Thursday.
MPs will want answers to help them and the public understand how it was possible for software to either be activated or inserted into Vodafone's computers, which then enabled the phones of at least 100 people - from top politicians to security chiefs, journalists and foreign businessmen - to be tapped.
This reportedly continued from the run-up to the Athens Olympics in August 2004 until the software was finally detected in the Spring of the following year. The MPs are also likely to ask about the alleged suicide of a top Vodafone network manager who was found hanged in his house in Athens two days after the tapping was uncovered and a day before Vodafone first informed the government.
The lawyer representing the man's family believes his death is suspicious and has called for his body to be exhumed for further examination. Vodafone has denied his death is connected to the scandal. It is widely believed in Greece that US intelligence agents were behind the phone tapping.
A former American diplomat based at the US embassy in Athens, who resigned three years ago, told the BBC he was convinced the Americans were involved. He says they did not trust the Greek authorities on the issue of protecting the Athens Olympics from any potential terrorist attack.
George Koronias - Vodafone Greece (Google Images)The Sunday Times February 05, 2006
Suicide mystery in Greek spy scandal
Philip Pangalos, in Athens
The suicide of a senior Vodafone employee in Athens last March is being re-examined to see whether it has any connection with a phone-tapping scandal in which the conversations of the Greek prime minister and other leading officials were monitored during the months before and after the 2004 Olympics.
Illegal software installed in a “ghost program” at Vodafone Greece allowed conversations to be recorded on about 100 mainly government mobiles until March 2005, when the surveillance was uncovered.
The conversations of Kostas Karamanlis, the prime minister, and his wife Natasa were taped. Other government figures targeted for eavesdropping included Petros Molyviatis, the foreign minister, Spilios Spiliotopoulos, the defence minister, and George Voulgarakis, the public order minister The affair has provoked fevered speculation with American security agents being widely blamed for the tapping. The Greek government has said four antennae near the US embassy in Athens were used to transmit the conversations recorded.
To Vima, an Athens daily, also claimed yesterday that MI6 had secret surveillance operations in the area, but security experts said the Americans have more advanced and discreet equipment.
As part of the government’s investigation into the scandal, the suicide of Kostas Tsalikidis, 39, Vodafone Greece’s head of network design, is being re-examined by police.
Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens flat on the morning of March 9, 2005, two days after the ghost program had been discovered and shut down by George Koronias, the Vodafone general manager, and a day before the prime minister’s office was informed.
At the time detectives found no suicide note. They are now examining the dead man’s laptop, which has been in police storage for the past year.
Vodafone issued a statement on Friday saying the death of its former employee was unconnected with the phone tapping. However, Tsalikidis’s family and friends have said that he spoke of work-related pressures prior to his death.
Charlie
hewitt.mobi Posted at 9:35 am |
1 comments
The telco engineering job no longer seems to be what it used to. I must confess that there has been a bit of a co-incidence with some of the elements of this article.
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1 Comments:
1) Running through that strictly confidential IMS_USER_MANUAL is a picture of a GUI making reference to a machine (prsm07) that I christened and setup for Ericsson 10 years ago! How did that document end up on the internet?
2) In early 2006 I was talking to Bill Zikou about transferring to Ericsson Athens when his face appeared on local TV (delayed N.E.T. TV played in Australia) almost spraying my morning coffee (just like the movies)!
3) I have worked with Ericsson twice, the first time I ended it in 1998 when coming back from holidays to discover that one of our staff members had been knocked off (strangled to death)!
The first time I worked with Ericsson in 1997 it was a very process and procedure driven organisation with copious amounts of documentation to describe pretty much everything. In Australia, Ericsson had a CMM level of 2. During this period the manufacturing of phones and circuit boards became too expensive forcing the local factories to be closed and work either outsourced or sent to China, however software and services remained strong. My induction took roughly 2 months.
The second time I worked with Ericsson in 2006 I saw people with old skills trying to relive the old ways and blend in with the furniture. While I was away from Ericsson I modernised my skills (AGILE, SOA, opensource, etc). The new Ericsson was using Windows 2000 server on low specification PCs to do software development. And it gets worse – staff were bringing in their personal copies of windows 2003 server to meet 3PP requirements just to move forward. I could not convince Ericsson to use Linux, I struggled to introduce VMWARE (it ran like a dog), and was forced to use old unsupported Sun Microsystems hardware – including the original IMS development machine (which I reformatted of course). The only induction for new staff was to throw them in the deep end.
If I were to give Ericsson a CMM rating it would be minus five. Perhaps I am a bit hard as the cost of supporting the old way is now too expensive. However these issues were not technical but more managerial as other aspects besides software development were lacking. For example, security was explained to us but its practice was often ignored with an I-don't want-to-know-about-it attitude by managers. This led to practices like developers setting up IP tunnels over the internet between two Ericsson buildings to access test equipment that was not allowed to be connected to the local area network - sometimes we found the test servers had been hacked and filled with pornographic content. Once when working back late (and the only time I worked through the entire night) in a supposedly secured Ericsson building I could hear someone violently bashing the door on the floor I worked on (level 37) at 3am in the morning. I was very fortunate he didn't get through the last line of defence and that he did not hide in the toilets which were outside. I could not report this to anyone – was someone going to knock me off that night? The final confirmation of this apathy came from someone I know who does not work in IT (he works in law enforcement) told me that he found an Ericsson pass that looked recent which he actually bothered to take to Ericsson direct and in his words "they didn’t even seem to care".
In the Human Resources aspect I saw individuals with extremely lucrative contracts, I saw people who literally did nothing, I saw bullying, personal abuse, and a huge staff turnaround. My line manager as it turned out was friends with the underworld owner of the largest brothel in Australia and boasted about having flown on his private jet. I found it rather unusual that he send his secretary to request my username and password before I left which was against Ericsson policy which he knew – of course I refused. I thought all this was very un-Ericsson until I came across The Ericsson Group website which exposes a significant amount of corruption in the company.
This dysfunction in Ericsson I feel is causing the vulnerable weakness to security. This dysfunction was deliberately done as it allowed certain senior players to manoeuvre themselves for building stronger personal empires. Ericsson I found is very unlike the old days, even Bill Zikou who is now CEO of Ericsson Australia remarked on how much better organised they were in his region in Europe. A clue to who was responsible for creating this dysfunction in Ericsson Australia can be found in a quote used by our technically challenged (no formal engineering qualifications) but very street smart Oracle DBA who kept on surviving even after introducing so many show stoppers and even after crashing the customers live mobile phone network service – he used to say quite regularly and loudly "I'm not Jewish but I wish I was". Definitely not a normal place to work in, but if you think of the rewards of taking control of systems that allow you to listen in to big business and politics then you begin to attract a different breed of worker.
, at
1:16 am
All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin. - John F. Kennedy
