Military, Security & Surveillance

G4S, the Anglo-Danish security contractor, has agreed to withdraw from prison work in Israel after activists disrupted the company annual general meeting for the second year in a row. The company is also under fire for ill-treatment of detainees in the UK, including the death of an Angolan man. Read More

Children have become lucrative targets for data mining companies, according to a study by Politico magazine. Just weeks after Google settled a lawsuit for selling student data for advertising, the publication revealed an entire industry devoted to marketing data gathered from Internet applications offered to students and their teachers. Read More

A Pakistani court has set a June 5 court date to hear a lawsuit from 'Bytes for All' - a digital rights group - for the alleged use of FinFisher spy software by the Pakistani government. The software is manufactured by Gamma International, an Anglo-German company. Read More

KBR and Halliburton - two major U.S. military contractors - can be sued for the health impacts of trash incineration on U.S. soldiers who served in the war in Iraq, according to a new court decision that allows a series of 57 lawsuits against the companies to go forward. Read More

Two U.S. companies - Linode of New Jersey and Rackspace of Texas - have been hosting surveillance software designed by Hacking Team of Italy, according to a new report. The software was allegedly been used by governments in Ethiopia, Morocco, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates to track dissidents. Read More

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

Families of 12 Nepali workers killed in Iraq in August 2004 have been denied permission by a federal judge to sue KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton of Houston, in an abrupt reversal of a previous court decision. Read More

An independent ombudsman has confirmed that World Bank officials should have raised serious questions before the International Finance Corporation (IFC) - the private sector arm of the World Bank - approved a $30 million loan to Corporación Dinant in Honduras in 2009 for palm oil plantation projects. Read More

At least four people were killed when Cambodian police opened fire on a garment workers protest in Canadia Industrial Park in Phnom Penh. The workers were demanding a minimum wage of $154 a month from employers who supply Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands as well as H&M. Read More