News Articles
| US/AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN: U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times May 15th, 2010 Top military officials continue to rely on a secret network of private spies set up by Michael D. Furlong, despite concerns about the legality of the operation. A New York Times review found Mr. Furlong’s operatives still providing information, with contractors still being paid under a $22 million contract, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by a Pentagon office. |
| AFGHANISTAN/US: Outsourcing intelligence by David Ignatius, Washington Post March 17th, 2010 The headline read like something you might see in the conspiracy-minded Pakistani press: "Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants." But the story appeared in Monday's New York Times, and it highlighted some big problems that have developed in the murky area between military and intelligence activities. |
| AFGHANISTAN/US: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants by DEXTER FILKINS and MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times March 15th, 2010 Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States. The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. |
| US/CHINA: U.S. Holds Fire in Google-China Feud by JAY SOLOMON, IAN JOHNSONAnd JASON DEAN, Wall Street Journal January 12th, 2010 U.S. government officials and business leaders were supportive but wary of taking sides in Google Inc.'s battle with China, a sign of the delicate tensions between the growing superpower and the West. Google has threatened to bolt from China over censorship and alleged cyber spying. |
| AFGHANISTAN: Lost in Limbo: Injured Afghan Translators Struggle to Survive by Pratap Chatterjee, ProPublica December 17th, 2009 Local translators are hidden casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military uses defense contractors to hire local residents to serve as translators for the troops. These local translators often live, sleep and eat with soldiers. And yet when they are wounded, they are often ignored by the U.S. system designed to provide them medical care and disability benefits, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica. |
| US: Cash-rich SAIC hits the acquisition trail by Sami Lais, Washington Technology August 6th, 2009 Making a big splash in recent weeks, Science Applications International Corp. bought two companies, adding new capabilities in cybersecurity, energy and disaster recovery — areas in which government spending is expected to grow. |
| IRAN: Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology by Christopher Rhoads and Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal June 22nd, 2009 The Iranian regime has developed one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet. The Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection. The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company. |
| US: Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for U.S. Government by CHRISTOPHER DREW and JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times May 30th, 2009 The Obama administration’s push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts. Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. |
| US: Contracting Boom Could Fizzle Out by Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post April 7th, 2009 The surge in the U.S. military contracting workforce would ebb under Defense Secretary Gates's budget proposal as the Pentagon moves to replace private workers with full-time civil servants. The move could affect companies such as CACI and SAIC. "We are right-sizing the defense acquisition workforce so we can improve our contract oversight and get a better deal for the taxpayers," said the Pentagon's director of defense procurement and acquisition policy. |
| IRAQ: U.S. to Fund Pro-American Publicity in Iraqi Media by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, Washingtom Post October 3rd, 2008 The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government. |
| US: Foggo pleads guilty in Wilkes case: Former CIA official fraudulently sent contracts to friend by Paul M. Krawzak, San Diego Union Tribune – Washington Bureau September 30th, 2008 Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the former No. 3 official in the CIA, pleaded guilty yesterday to fraudulently steering intelligence contracts to his lifelong friend, former Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes. |
| UK: Qinetiq buys US spy services firm BBC News August 4th, 2008 Qinetiq, once owned by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), said it would it pay $104.5m (£53m) in cash for the firm. |
| IRAQ: Iraq Case Sheds Light On Secret Contractors by Siobhan Gorman and August Cole, Wall Street Journal July 17th, 2008 Court documents and interviews with whistleblowers shed light on persistent problems in the operations of private military and security company MVM, Inc., a top provider of secret security to U.S. intelligence agencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. |
| US: Court dismisses lawsuit on secret kidnapping by Adam Tanner, Reuters February 14th, 2008 A federal judge, saying the case involved a state secret, dismissed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a unit of Boeing Co that charged the firm helped fly terrorism suspects abroad to secret prisons. |
| US: Bush Presses House to Approve Bill on Surveillance
by ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times February 13th, 2008 The president’s remarks came the morning after the Senate handed the White House a major victory by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers and to give legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s program of eavesdropping without warrants. |
| US: CIA Likely Let Contractors Perform Waterboarding by SIOBHAN GORMAN, The Wall Street Journal February 8th, 2008 The CIA's secret interrogation program has made extensive use of outside contractors, whose role likely included the waterboarding of terrorist suspects, according to testimony yesterday from the CIA director and two other people familiar with the program. |
| UK: FBI wants instant access to British identity data
by Owen Bowcott, The Guardian (UK) January 15th, 2008 Americans seek international database to carry iris, palm and finger prints |
| US: Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry by Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane, New York Times December 16th, 2007 The Bush administration is waging a high-profile campaign to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program. At stake is the federal government's partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime. |
| US: Failure to Launch: In Death of Spy Satellite Program, Lofty Plans and Unrealistic Bids by Philip Taubman, New York Times November 11th, 2007 Collapse of a government funded project to build new spy satellites was all but inevitable. |
| US: Intel official: Say goodbye to privacy by Pamela Hess , Associated Press November 11th, 2007 Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information. |
| US: Yahoo plea over China rights case
BBC News November 7th, 2007 Internet giant Yahoo has asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of complicity in rights abuses and acts of torture in China. |
| CHINA: An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom by Keith Bradsher, New York Times September 11th, 2007 China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks, has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s listing is just a sign of ever-closer ties among Wall Street, surveillance companies and the Chinese government’s security apparatus. |
| US: Role of Telecom Firms in Wiretaps Is Confirmed by Eric Lichtblau, New York Times August 24th, 2007 The Bush administration has confirmed for the first time that American telecommunications companies played a crucial role in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program after asserting for more than a year that any role played by them was a “state secret.” |
| US: Boeing unit subject of refiled CIA-flight suit by Bloomberg News, Chicago Tribune August 2nd, 2007 A Boeing Co. unit falsified flight plans to disguise the Central Intelligence Agency's transporting of terrorism suspects to secret prisons overseas, the American Civil Liberties Union claims in an updated lawsuit. |
| US: As Iraq Costs Soar, Contractors Earn Record Profits by Eli Clifton, Inter Press Service News Agency August 2nd, 2007 In a report to lawmakers earlier this week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that the war in Iraq could cost U.S. taxpayers over a trillion dollars when the long-term costs of caring for soldiers wounded in action, military and economic aid for the Iraqi government, and ongoing costs associated with the 190,000 troops stationed in Iraq are totaled up. |
| IRAQ: A Private Realm Of Intelligence-Gathering; Firm Extends U.S. Government's Reach by Steve Fainaru and Alec Klein, Washington Post Foreign Service July 1st, 2007 On the first floor of a tan building inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the full scope of Iraq's daily carnage is condensed into a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation. The intelligence was compiled not by the U.S. military, but by a British security firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd. The Reconstruction Operations Center is the most visible example of how intelligence collection is now among the responsibilities handled by a network of private security companies that work in the shadows of the U.S. military. |
| IRAQ: 'Pentagon Moved to Fix Iraqi Media Before Invasion' by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service May 9th, 2007 In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon planned to create a 'Rapid Reaction Media Team' (RRMT) designed to ensure control over major Iraqi media while providing an Iraqi 'face' for its efforts, according to a ‘White Paper' obtained by the independent National Security Archive (NSA) which released it Tuesday. |
| US: Translator Who Faked Identity Pleads Guilty To Having Secret Data by Josh White, Washington Post February 15th, 2007 An Arabic translator who used an assumed identity to get work as a contractor for the U.S. Army in Iraq pleaded guilty yesterday to federal charges of possessing classified national defense documents, including sensitive material about the insurgency that he took from an 82nd Airborne Division intelligence group in 2004. |
| PERU: UN Mission Probes Private Security Groups by Ángel Páez, Inter Press News Service (IPS) February 7th, 2007 A priest who provides support for Peruvian farmers in their conflict with a transnational gold mining corporation complained to a United Nations mission that he was under surveillance by a private security company. |
| IRAQ: US money is 'squandered' in Iraq BBC News January 31st, 2007 Millions of dollars in US rebuilding funds have been wasted in Iraq, US auditors say in a report which warns corruption in the country is rife. |
| US: PUC Not Letting Verizon off Hook by Ann S. Kim, Portland Press Herald (MAINE) January 30th, 2007 The Maine Public Utilities Commission decided Monday to begin contempt proceedings against Verizon Communications for failing to affirm the truthfulness of statements the company made about its possible role in the government's warrantless surveillance program. |
| US: New Scanners for Tracking City Workers by Sewell Chan, New York Times January 23rd, 2007 The Bloomberg administration is devoting more than $180 million toward state-of-the-art technology to keep track of when city employees come and go, with one agency requiring its workers to scan their hands each time they enter and leave the workplace. |
| US: Muslim Says He Was Abducted By U.S. by Armen Keteyian and Phil Hirschkorn., CBS News November 28th, 2006 Khaled El-Masri says he is not after money but answers about why he spent five months in harsh captivity as a prisoner in the war on terrorism. |
| US: Congressman's Favors for Friend Include Help in Secret Budget by John R. Wilke, Wall Street Journal November 1st, 2006 With Rep. Gibbons's Backing, An Ex-Trader for Milken Wins Millions in Contracts A Lawsuit's Sensitive Subject |
| IRAQ: Pentagon Audit Clears Propaganda Effort by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times October 20th, 2006 An American military propaganda campaign that planted favorable news articles in the Iraqi news media did not violate laws or Pentagon regulations, but it was not properly supervised by military officials in Baghdad, an audit by the Pentagon Inspector General has concluded. |
| IRAQ: Corporate Torture in Iraq by Ali Eteraz, Counter Punch October 11th, 2006 What remains under-reported and under-appreciated is the fact that this war has afforded a vast collection of corporations to reap the benefits of lucrative government contracts. A number of such companies are involved in supervising, maintaining, and providing support for the numerous prisons in Iraq in the areas of interrogation, interpretation, and translation. |
| IRAQ: Firm That Paid Iraq Papers Gets New Deal by Rebecca Santana, Associated Press September 27th, 2006 A public relations company that participated in a controversial U.S. military program that paid Iraqi newspapers for stories favorable to coalition forces has been awarded another multimillion-dollar media contract with American forces in Iraq. |
| US: Border Security Contract Goes To Boeing Reuters September 22nd, 2006 Boeing Co. has been chosen to build a "virtual fence" using sensors and cameras along the U.S. border with Mexico and Canada to help control illegal immigration in a contract projected to be worth up to $2 billion. |
| US: Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs
by Greg Miller, The Los Angeles Times September 17th, 2006 At the National Counterterrorism Center — the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like Sept. 11 — more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors. |
| US: Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture by Joshua Holland, Alternet September 14th, 2006 The thousands of mercenary security contractors employed in the Bush administration's "War on Terror" are billed to American taxpayers, but they've handed Osama Bin Laden his greatest victories -- public relations coups that have transformed him from just another face in a crowd of radical clerics to a hero of millions in the global South (posters of Bin Laden have been spotted in largely Catholic Latin America during protests against George W. Bush). |
| CANADA: Our side of defence
by Jorge Barrera, The Ottawa Times August 20th, 2006 Ottawa may have the reputation of a government town, but it's also home to Canada's military-industrial complex. |
| US: Pentagon Orders Investigation Of Cunningham's MZM Earmark by Walter Pincus , Washington Post March 24th, 2006 Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone ordered an internal study of how funding earmarked in a bill by then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) led to contracts for MZM Inc. to do work for the Pentagon's new agency: the Counterintelligence Field Activity. |
| IRAQ: Increase in Contracting Intelligence Jobs Raises Concerns by Walter Pincus, The Washington Post March 20th, 2006 By using contract employees for intelligence work, government agencies lose control over those doing this sensitive work and an element of profit is inserted into what is being done. Also, as investigations have revealed, politics and corruption may be introduced into the process. |
| US: AS US Falter in Iraq, China Gains by Tom Plate , The Seattle Times August 23rd, 2005 It looks as if history will judge Mahathir to have been the wiser of the two owls. The U.S. military is enmeshed in a vicious insurgency and there may be no way out — except, in fact, to get out, outright. |
| US: Lockheed Martin Is Hired to Bolster Transit Security in N.Y. by Sewell Chan and Shadi Rahimi, The New York Times August 23rd, 2005 A new world of transit security in New York City began to take form this morning, as officials disclosed plans to saturate the transit system with 1,000 video cameras, 3,000 motion detectors and a wide array of sophisticated gadgets, all intended to buffer the city's subways, bridges and tunnels from a terror attack. |
| Iraq: CACI Probed on Keeping Future Government Contracts by Chelsea Emery, Reuters May 27th, 2004 Federal officials are investigating whether employees of defense contractor CACI International Inc. were involved in prisoner abuse in Iraq and whether the company should remain eligible for government contracts, CACI said on Thursday. |
| Iraq: Titan's Army contract under review by Bruce V. Bigelow, San Diego Union-Tribune May 27th, 2004 The Army command that hired San Diego's Titan Corp. to provide Arabic linguists to units in Iraq is evaluating whether the lucrative contract should be awarded to another company. |
| Iraq: CACI Contracts Blocked by Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post May 26th, 2004 The Interior Department's inspector general is reviewing the contracting procedures that allowed the Army to hire civilian interrogators in Iraq and has blocked the Army from using the contract to place new orders with Arlington-based CACI International Inc., an agency spokesman said yesterday. |
| Iraq: Contractors Implicated in Prison Abuse Remain on the Job by Joel Brinkley and James Glanz, New York Times May 4th, 2004 More than two months after a classified Army report found that two contract workers were implicated in the abuse of Iraqis at a prison outside Baghdad, the companies that employ them say that they have heard nothing from the Pentagon, and that they have not removed any employees from Iraq. |
| Iraq: CACI to Open Probe of Workers by By Renae Merle and Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post May 3rd, 2004 Defense contractor CACI International Inc. said yesterday it launched an independent investigation of its employees in connection with allegations that Iraqi detainees were abused by U.S. soldiers at an Army-run prison in Iraq. |
| Iraq: Prisoner Abuse Appears More Extensive
by T. Christian Miller, Los Angeles Times May 2nd, 2004 At least one Iraqi prisoner died after interrogation, some were threatened with attack dogs and others were kept naked in tiny cells without running water or ventilation, according to an account written by a military police sergeant who is one of six U.S. soldiers charged in a growing scandal over prisoner abuse in Iraq. |
| Iraq: Prison Workers Questioned by T. Christian Miller and Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times May 1st, 2004 CACI International of Arlington, Va., said the employees had volunteered to be interviewed in a case in which six U.S. soldiers have been charged with sexually and physically abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. |
| Iraq: Trade Fair Postponed Over Security Fears by Joshua Chaffin and Salamander Davoudi, Financial Times April 1st, 2004 The deteriorating security situation in Iraq has prompted the postponement of a US-led trade fair aimed at accelerating reconstruction in the country amid heightening concerns about the safety of foreign civilians working there. Organisers of Destination Baghdad Expo, that was due to begin on Monday, postponed the event following the gruesome killings on Wednesday of four western contract workers in the city of Falluja. |
| US: Opens Probe Into Contractor Titan Corp. by Renae Merle , Washington Post March 6th, 2004 The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether San Diego defense contractor Titan Corp. made illegal payments to international consultants, endangering Lockheed Martin Corp.'s plan to buy the firm. |
| US: Army, Industry Speed Document Exploitation by Ann Roosevelt, Defense Daily February 10th, 2004 The Army has enlisted The Sytex Group, Inc.'s Sytex unit and American Management Systems [AMSY] to aid soldiers in Iraq translate and manage captured foreign documents with the Document and Media Exploitation (DOMEX) Tactical Support Suite (TSS). |
| Iraq: Bay Area civilian vanishes in Iraq by Colin Freeman, San Francisco Chronicle November 11th, 2003 A Moss Beach man working as a contractor for the U.S. Army in Iraq has mysteriously disappeared while driving along an isolated road north of the country's violence-plagued Sunni Triangle. |
| Afghanistan: Ex-SAS man framed for Kabul killings by Lucy Morgan Edwards, Sunday Times (London) June 15th, 2003 A BRITISH man held in jail in Kabul and accused of killing two Afghans in a mysterious shoot-out in his hotel bedroom has declared his innocence. |
| Georgia: US Privatizes Military Aid by Nick Paton Walsh, Guardian (London) June 6th, 2003 The Pentagon is to privatise its military presence in Georgia by contracting a team of retired US military officers to equip and advise the former Soviet republic's crumbling military, embellishing an eastward expansion that has enraged Moscow. |
| USA: Spying for Fun and Profit by Kari Lydersen, Alternet May 28th, 2003 Survelliance technologies raise serious questions about invasions of privacy and violations of civil liberties. They also cost a lot of money. Taxpayers fund this massively beefed up security. Private corporations and even individuals are also paying large amounts to boost their own security procedures in light of the war on terrorism. Naturally, someone is also profiting off this boom. |
| Iraq: Plugging Into The Networked War by Diane Brady , Business Week April 21st, 2003 When Frank C. Lanza pictures combat in Iraq, he sees the invisible links connecting the electronics installed on fighter jets and tanks to commanders sitting hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. He sees dumb bombs made "smart," and unmanned vehicles that can assess Saddam's strongholds. On the home front, the CEO of L-3 Communications Corp. already sees his company's equipment handling tasks ranging from airport security to training first responders for terrorist attacks. And after the war, he foresees helping to rebuild a shattered Iraq with L-3's networked software and infrastructure consultants. |
| US: Air Force job to send 100 Sytex staffers to Asia by Harold Brubaker, Philadelphia Inquirer January 31st, 2003 A Doylestown information technology company signed a five-year, $98 million contract yesterday to provide communications support services to the Air Force in southwestern Asia. |
| Kuwait: Colleaugues mourn N.H. native killed in Kuwait attack Associated Press January 24th, 2003 Colleagues of an American software executive killed in Kuwait while working on a military contract remembered him as hardworking and caring. |
| Kuwait: Poway man killed, San Diegan injured by Bradley J. Fikes, North County Times January 22nd, 2003 A North County software executive was shot and killed in Kuwait on Tuesday and a colleague injured by the same gunman in an ambush near an American military base. |
| US: Seeking Nashville Kurds Associated Press December 31st, 2002 Kurdish immigrants in Nashville are among those being recruited in three cities to work as translators for Army troops and personnel in case of war in Iraq. |
| US: Prophet Rushed to the Field For Intelligence Collection by Elizabeth G. Book, National Defense Magazine April 1st, 2002 The Army's tactical signals-intelligence and electronic-warfare system, the Prophet, has undergone a faster-than-planned development cycle, in order to meet operational needs in Afghanistan. The systems in the field today are not the full "100 percent solution," officials said, but they provide a sound foundation for the Army to plan future upgrades. |
| US: 'New War' May Shift Defense Spending by Gary Gentile, Associated Press October 1st, 2001 In the nation's "new kind of war" on terrorism, defense spending is likely to focus as much on information and surveillance as bombs and bullets. |
| Brazil: Amazon Contractor Raytheon has CIA Ties by Pratap Chatterjee, Inter Press Service December 3rd, 1995 A contract to monitor the Amazon rainforest in Brazil will include a shadowy company once described as ''virtually indistinguishable'' from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The 1.4-billion-dollar contract for satellite monitoring of drug trafficking and deforestation in the 3.2-million-square-kilometre forests in the Brazilian Amazon was awarded last summer to Raytheon, a 12-billion-dollar, Massachusetts-based company, Raytheon, that makes Patriot and Sidewinder missiles. |
| Brazil: Police Wiretap Jeopardizes Raytheon Radar Project
by Katherine Ellison , The Miami Herald November 25th, 1995 It was meant to be a shining model of the new era of inter-American trade: a $1.4 billion U.S. contract -- the largest ever awarded in Brazil -- in which the Massachusetts- based Raytheon Corp. would build a vast radar project in the Amazon jungle. |
| US: Secret Task Led to Web Of Firms; Virginian Ran Covert Missions Washington Post March 22nd, 1987 The mission that apparently launched the network of private companies now embroiled in the Iran-contra affair took place in October 1983, when an obscure U.S. Army unit asked a retired lieutenant colonel to undertake a secret job in the Caribbean, according to informed sources. |