Technology & Telecommunications

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

Technology companies willingly provided information to U.S. government agencies to help the Obama administration snoop on reporters from the Associated Press and Fox news in order to ostensibly crack down on leaks that pose a "threat" to national security. Read More

Jaffa oranges sold in European supermarkets labeled "Made in Israel" may have been grown and packaged in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, according to a report from the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, an international coalition of Palestinian NGOs and activists. Read More