So she was hacked. There dawns the realisation that it was a matter of time, one way or another. When we recently talked about the possibility of her being targeted in this way, in advance of all this, she ended the conversation with ‘μάνα μου εν έσιει τίποτε.’ Her sense that there’s nothing to hide frustrated me (1), not because I thought she should be worried beyond the occasional change of password, but because I wanted to draw her into a conversation about privacy vs. transparency, which she didn’t have time for. Of course her being targeted presupposes a particular kind of hostile intention against her, which in her line of work is nothing unusual.

I find it terribly interesting that Cypriot news articles have so far attempted no reflection on the politics behind the Russian blog post, parts of which they uncritically reproduce. There’s nothing about the Russian extradition politics, and nothing about the hacking politics: first, the leak was shared on a blogspot set-up specifically for this one post, which must have been sent directly to Politis (by whom?!); second, this is probably the third major Cyprus-related leak after Hacking Team and the Panama Papers; and third, this is probably the first hack that specifically targets a single person / a Cypriot public official at such scale (I’m not sure we should count that thing with Anastasiades’ facebook account). Continue reading →