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A Virginia judge has been asked to decided whether or not Custer Battles, an upstart security company assigned to guard Baghdad airport, had defrauded its customers by as much as $50 million. But company lawyers are arguing that the United States government did not control the Iraqi oil money, seized during the occupation, used to pay the company.

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.

The popularity of steroid abuse has long been discussed as American troops and contractors in Iraq work out in gyms set up in bases and even in the mirrored halls of one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

Tim Shorrock, a veteran investigative journalist and a longtime subscriber to the Dirt Diggers Digest, has just come out with a book called Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.
Shorrock describes how an activity that used to be handled by spooks on
the federal payroll has been steadily transformed into a $50 billion
Intelligence-Industrial Complex.

The U.S. Department of Defense is developing regulations to deal with the more than 60 private security companies -- totaling about 25,000 employees -- working throughout Iraq as the country struggles to rebuild itself during a time of war.