News stories by Pratap Chatterjee

BERKELEY, California, Sep 08 (IPS) - 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.

BERKELEY, California, Aug 25 (IPS) - 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 the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

BERKELEY, California, Aug 24 (IPS) - How do U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the whole world? The ideal place to tap trans-border telecommunications is undersea cables that carry an estimated 90 percent of international voice traffic.

WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (IPS) - Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fibre technology, offers government agencies a software product called "CyberSweep" to intercept signals on undersea cables.

WASHINGTON, Jul 05 (IPS) - Spy equipment from the Surveillance Group Limited, a British private detective agency based in Worcester, England, has been found in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange, editor of Wikileaks, has taken refuge.

WASHINGTON, Jul 02 (IPS) - Late on Monday night, Sarah Harrison, a Wikileaks activist, hand-delivered 21 letters to Kim Shevchenko, the duty officer at the Russian consulate office in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, on behalf of Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower.

WASHINGTON, Jun 17 (IPS) - Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex - the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country's 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

Pentagon chief Robert Gates has called for a cutback of 15 billion dollars in wasteful military spending on contractors as well as government bureaucracy, or risk not being able to pay for its current force.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley leaders have teamed up with Middle Eastern royalty and high-level U.S. diplomats to send a message to heads of state who are gathering here in Washington next week: the world needs to reduce its nuclear arsenal to zero as soon as possible.

Private security guards abandoning their posts at the U.S. embassy in Kabul for up to three and a half hours.