Technology & Telecommunications

Mass surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency involves close partnerships with high-tech companies in order to gather data on everyday people. The agency has cut deals to install secret backdoors into computers; exploit flaws in popular software; and surreptitiously analyze personal data from smartphone games. Read More

Millennial Media, a Baltimore based ad company, creates "intrusive" profiles of users of smartphone applications and games like Angry Birds, according to documents leaked to the media by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Such profiles have been exploited by intelligence authorities like the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), say investigative journalists. Read More

YPF, the Argentinian state-owned oil company, has signed an agreement with Chevron in the U.S. to extract shale gas and oil using fracking technology in the southern Andes mountains. Local environmental and indigenous activists are gearing up for a fight to stop the controversial technology. Read More

What was Mostapha Maanna of Hacking Team, an Italian surveillance company, doing on his three trips to Saudi Arabia in the last year? A new data trove from WikiLeaks reveals travel details for salesmen like Maanna who hawk electronic technology to track communications by individuals without their knowledge Read More

Turkmenistan and Oman have been negotiating with a consortium of British, German and Swiss companies to buy "FinFisher" software to spy on phone calls and Internet activity of unsuspecting targets, according to a new trove of documents just released by Wikileaks, the global whistleblowing organization. Read More

Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fiber technology, offers government agencies a software product called "CyberSweep" to intercept signals on undersea cables. The company says their technology can analyze Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter to discover "actionable intelligence." Read More

James Bimen Associates of Virginia and Harris Corporation of Florida have contracts with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hack into computers and phones of surveillance targets, according to Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. Read More

Bugging equipment from the Surveillance Group Limited, a British private detective agency, has been found in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange, editor of Wikileaks, has taken refuge. The spy devices have so far failed to foil the whistle blowing group's daring exploits to support Edward Snowden. Read More

Military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is in the news over two of its former employees: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower, and James Clapper, U.S. intelligence czar. A review of Booz Allen's own high level conflicts of interest and shoddy work suggests that Congress should target the company, not the messenger. Read More

Google and Facebook have discussed - and possibly built - special portals for the U.S. government to snoop on user data, according to revelations sparked by an investigative series of articles by Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian. Read More