Military, Security & Surveillance

Two U.S. companies can be prosecuted for the alleged role of their employees in torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a U.S. federal court ruled last week. The companies are CACI of Arlington, Virginia, which provided the interrogators at the prison, and L-3/Titan of New York city, which provided translators at the same location. Read More

El Proceso quotes Anna Feigenbaum and Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch on how the private security industry has cashed in on the War on Terror. Read More

Facebook, the social network behemoth that is about to become a multi-billion dollar company, has been lobbying for a proposed new U.S. law called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that would allow companies to share information with government agencies. Read More

"Is Rioting a Form of Urban Terrorism?" The headline for a press release was a provocative introduction to the annual Counter Terror Expo in Olympia, London, which opens this week. (April 25 & 26) Eight thousand visitors are expected to descend on 400 exhibitions of counter-terrorism technologies and services. Read More

Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics of the U.S. face divestment from major UK banks, for manufacturing cluster bombs. The Guardian newspaper has exclusively reported that Aviva, the UK's largest insurance company; Scottish Widows (part of the Lloyds Banking Group) and the Co-op Bank will sell shares in these companies, following a similar move by the Royal Bank of Scotland last year. Read More

Big Brother is watching Iranians with a little help from Chinese and European companies. Reuters revealed that ZTE Corporation had sold Tehran surveillance technology. This comes in wake of revelations late last year by Bloomberg that Creativity Software in the UK had sold the Iranians "location tracking and text-message monitoring equipment." Read More

The U.S. sends weapons to Egypt, Russia sends weapons to to Syria and the European Union to Saudi Arabia, according to new reports from Amnesty and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This is despite conclusive evidence that these weapons are being used for human rights abuse. Read More

Mahmoud Karzai, brother to the Afghan president and Abdul Hasin Fahim, brother to the vice-president, are the real symbols of corruption in Afghanistan. Kabul Bank has helped finance their shady deals and contracts with the U.S. military Read More

The world's nuclear weapons industry is being funded - and kept alive - by more than 300 banks, pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers in 30 countries, according to a new study by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Read More

A new cache of Wikileaks documents on the secretive surveillance industry uncovers 160 companies in 25 countries that make $5 billion a year selling sophisticated surveillance technology to security authorities around the world to secretly carry out mass surveillance of people via their phones and computers. Read More