A forensic expert and former member of the police force says Cyprus Police carried out interceptions and monitored citizens’ conversations in real time, while related legislation remains unenforced.
Alexis Mavros, a certified IACIS Computer Forensics Examiner with an MSc in Computer Forensics, made the claim.
Speaking last Tuesday on Alpha TV and responding to a question from journalist Katia Savva, Mavros said with certainty that Police carried out interceptions.
He cited both his time serving in the Police and what he has since learned as a private expert on the subject. Asked by the journalist whether this was illegal, he avoided answering directly, saying a lawyer would be better placed to address that question.
Savva asked whether lawful interception, of the kind discussed in relation to organised crime, was already happening in Cyprus under a court order, noting that such a framework had never actually worked or been applied.
Mavros replied that, from what he knew both from his police service and since as a private citizen, it exists and happens, though a lawyer would better explain the legal framework. On classic interception, he said it “exists and happens, for certain.”
The surveillance law was passed in 2020, but it has never emerged that the Republic’s authorities responsible for public and national security carried out lawful interception under it.
Officials asked at various times why the Law was not being implemented cited technical issues preventing lawful interceptions. It later emerged, however, that providers were unwilling to take part in interceptions under the existing legislative framework.
As philenews revealed on March 1, 2026, CYTA raised concerns over constitutional rights, prompting new legislation to return to Parliament for discussion recently, without producing any substantive result.
The fact that the Law had been dormant had already become apparent earlier. Criminal lawyer Ilias Stefanou was asked about this on a television programme around the end of 2022.
Responding to a question from Katia Savva, Stefanou distinguished between two separate issues: real-time communication, meaning listening in or monitoring when one person speaks to another, and who spoke to whom and for how long, without accessing the content itself.
On the first issue, he said legislation allowing authorities to monitor criminal activity in this way had passed, but he was not aware of it having been implemented, and no request of this kind had come to his attention. Equipment would need to be purchased for it to work, he added.
The second issue, who spoke to whom and for how long, was struck down by the Supreme Court’s plenary session, Stefanou noted.
This “is a problem at a pan-European level,” he said, not one confined to Cyprus. Every country faces the same challenge of setting criteria for retaining all citizens’ data, and the European Court of Justice has ruled that specific suspicions must exist before authorities can monitor who is speaking to whom, and for how long.
Authorities are therefore relying on separate legislation at this level, Stefanou said, which is also under review by the Supreme Court, specifically over whether it is permissible to invoke different legislation from the one that actually provides for this possibility.
