War & Disaster Profiteering

Raytheon, a U.S. military manufacturer, is selling a new software surveillance package named "Riot" that claims to predict where individuals are expected to go next using technology that mines data from social networks like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Read More

Jorge Scientific Corporation, a military contractor with nearly a billion dollars in U.S. government contracts, is being sued by former employees for "shocking misconduct" in Afghanistan. The charges include illegal and reckless use of firearms, abusing alcohol and drugs and billing the government for property destroyed during raucous parties. Read More

A contract between a British subsidiary of European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company and Sangcom, the communications arm of the Saudi National Guard, is being investigated after Ian Foxley, a former project manager, blew the whistle. Read More

Blackwater has agreed to pay the U.S. government $7.5 million to settle 17 federal criminal charges that include supplying guns to the king of Jordan and offering private security and military training services to South Sudan without a license. Read More

Sierra Nevada Corporation from Sparks, Nevada, and R-4, Inc. from Eatontown, New Jersey - are two companies at the forefront of the covert war in Africa, where they operate small Swiss aircraft to spy on behalf of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Read More

Details of 6,500 "extraordinary rendition" flights conducted by CIA contractors to transport over 1,100 victims to and from prison sites around the world are to be released by NGOs Reprieve Access Info Europe working in collaboration with Kent University and Kingston University in the UK. Read More

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

"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