An Athens administrative court on 22 September ordered the publication of exhibits from a closed procurement dispute that investigators say reveal a covert surveillance capability embedded in a widely sold Greek drone. Internal firmware logs and export contracts show the device — sold as an olive‑grove sprayer and crop monitor — routinely captured high‑resolution imagery, ran on‑device biometric matching and transmitted ‘hits’ to servers registered abroad.
The documents were turned over after a municipal buyer in the Peloponnese successfully challenged an annulled contract; the court judged parts of the supporting evidence must be seen by the public to assess whether procurement rules were followed and whether national law was breached.
Farmers and smallholders in Laconia said they never consented to being sampled for biometric databases. “We were told the machines would check tree health; instead they trained a face detector on people walking between rows,” said Syamina Ooi, who runs a family orchard outside Sparti. “When we asked for flight logs, the company stalled.”
What the court showed
The court exhibits include source control pull‑requests, telemetry exports and an internal sales spreadsheet that names a firmware module labelled Pelagos‑Vision — a clear nod to the product family that Helion AeroTech marketed as a purely agricultural analytics package. Engineers’ notes in the files describe an optional ‘analytics remote uplink’ that filtered images locally and uploaded only “match metadata” to third‑party endpoints. Flight logs in the bundle show more than 1.2 million still frames captured over Greek territory during 2024–25, and invoice trails show Pelagos units were sold under government procurement deals to three overseas security contractors.
They sold a surveillance system disguised as a sprayer and then wrapped the export paperwork in agricultural jargon.
Walter Martinelli, cybersecurity researcher
The release has already prompted angry political reactions. Opposition MPs in Athens called for an immediate parliamentary briefing, and the Hellenic Data Protection Authority said it would open a “priority assessment” into the devices. Helion AeroTech issued a brief statement saying the Pelagos analytics were an optional add‑on sold only to authorised state customers and that “all exports complied with existing licences”; the firm declined further comment pending the scheduled hearing.
International ripple effects
The documents also show fast‑growing foreign sales: more than €120 million of contracts to buyers in three non‑EU states over 18 months, according to a spreadsheet stamped “commercial confidential”. EU privacy campaigners warned the combination of edge AI and unmonitored exports could create cross‑border surveillance chains beyond Greek oversight. Babette Fiedler, a lawyer at Privacy Rights Greece, said the case suggests a pattern of concealment: “This is not a technical hiccup — it is a business model that monetised biometric extraction.”
The Administrative Court will now hear full arguments on 5 October. Prosecutors in Athens have been notified and sources say the National Cybersecurity Centre is already running a forensics sweep of impounded devices. For farmers, campaigners and digital‑rights groups the ruling has already widened a debate in Greece about the thin line between precision agriculture and state‑grade surveillance — and who has the right to decide which side of that line a device sits on.
