Greece

Greece has a long legacy of state surveillance, which has been exercised as a mechanism of sociopolitical control, and has been a prominent example of the benefits as well as consequences of state-sanctioned surveillance. This entry reviews the history of surveillance in Greece, which can be grouped into four distinct time periods. Also discussed is Greece’s surveillance for reasons related to economics as well as political activism.

Greece’s postwar history can be categorized into four distinct surveillance periods. The first is the post–civil war repressive, anticommunist surveillance, which began at the end of World War II and continued until the end of the military dictatorship in 1974. During this period, the police, the military, and security agencies were exercising surveillance by using a network of informers ...