Three EU-based firms are suspected of trying to smuggle arms to Belarus and Russia, in what might be the tip of a larger black market. Czech firm Česká zbrojovka tried to export over 100 rifles and pistols via Moldova to Russia in 2020, according to a Moldovan document seen by EUobserver. The shipment included ‘CZ […]

The European Union’s poorly co-ordinated arms export policy is undermining Europe’s security, its foreign policy and its defence industry. The EU’s arms export policy should have three aims. First, arms control, in order to keep arms out of the wrong hands. Second, targeted arms exports to allies and countries that share the EU’s security challenges. […]

The Council of the EU is currently struggling over whether to impose an arms embargo on Russia as punishment for its role in destabilising Ukraine. Several governments in the EU, including the UK, have already announced that they are denying arms export licences for Russia and revoking those that have previously been granted. Also in […]

The West has slapped stringent sanctions on Russia in response to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, believed by the U.S. and others to have been shot down with a Russia-supplied Buk missile system by eastern Ukraine rebels. While the introduction of financial sanctions will create the most immediate squeeze on Russia, it is […]

Since 2014, the news media and other observers have provided accounts of weapon sourcing to armed formations operating in certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. To date, efforts  to verify these claims have relied largely on examinations of open-source photos and videos of weapons and ammunition, rather than systematic field-based investigations. […]

The tough future of Russia’s attack drones The rapid development of military drones around the world has raised a natural question time and time again-why is Russia so backward in design and production? In most cases, the main reason for this is the lazy thinking of the military and engineers. However, one of the most […]

Editor’s Note When we published the key points of the report “Weapons of War in Ukraine” by the UK-based investigative organization Conflict Armament Research, it caught our eye that between 2014 and 2018, the drone manufacturer Israel Aerospace Industries supplied a sanctioned Russian defense company with UAV components produced by various European and US manufacturers, […]

The surveillance drones contained computer chips and components made in the United States and Europe In early 2017, Ukrainian forces battling Russia-backed separatists shot down a drone conducting surveillance over the eastern flank of Ukraine. The unmanned aircraft, nearly six feet long with a cone-shaped nose and a shiny gray body, had all the external […]

The engine got here from a German firm that provides model-airplane hobbyists. Laptop chips for navigation and wi-fi communication had been made by U.S. suppliers. A British firm offered a motion-sensing chip. Different components got here from Switzerland and South Korea. “I used to be stunned after we checked out all of it collectively to […]

British components have been found in Russian-made spy drones captured by Ukrainian and Lithuanian forces, a report shows. The parts are among European kit discovered on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) deployed over Ukraine and neighbouring countries during the conflict in the country’s eastern Donbass region, researchers have found. Ukraine is under the threat of invasion, […]

Russian-made military drones containing British components are being used by pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine and can now be used to target UK soldiers deployed there in the event of an invasion of Moscow, I to learn. Arms experts said an analysis of Russian-made surveillance planes intercepted over Ukraine showed they were made with electronics […]

Pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine are using Russian-made military drones with British components, which could now be used to attack UK troops stationed there if Moscow invades.i has learned. An analysis of Russian-built surveillance drones intercepted over Ukraine found that they were built with electronics and mechanical parts from Western countries, including the United Kingdom, […]

Het Delftse computer- en beveiligingsbedrijf Fox-IT verkoopt sinds 2010 haar producten in Rusland en is hier na de invoering van de internationale sancties tegen het land in 2014 mee doorgegaan. De Nederlandse overheid is een belangrijke klant van Fox-IT. Het bedrijf verzorgt onder andere de beveiliging van staatsgeheimen. De Rus Evgeny Gengrinovich speelt een sleutelrol […]

Sinds de Arabische Lente zijn meerdere westerse computer- en beveiligingsbedrijven in opspraak geraakt vanwege hun leveranties aan repressieve regimes in het Midden-Oosten. Sommige bedrijven zijn daarvoor ook juridisch vervolgd. Ook in Nederland stond de export van Nederlandse bedrijven (waaronder Fox-IT) naar landen in het Midden-Oosten rond 2011 in de politieke en publieke belangstelling. Het Midden-Oosten […]

It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter […]

The recent discovery of two informants within the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reveals one of the most nefarious dimensions of Islamophobic surveillance in the US: the informant industrial complex, writes Khaled A. Beydoun. This past September marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. It also marked two decades of state-sponsored surveillance that […]

Since he was a teen, Craig Monteilh has pretended to be someone he wasn’t – Russian, Muslim, a white supremacist. It was a skill he learned early, says Monteilh, a 47-year-old Irvine man who, according to court records, provided information to the FBI. He learned to gain people’s trust – even while pretending to be […]

In 2006, the FBI ordered an informant to pose as a Muslim convert and spy on the congregants of several large, diverse mosques in Orange County, California. The agent, Craig Monteilh, professed his conversion before hundreds of congregants during the month of Ramadan. Renaming himself “Farouk,” the informant quickly made friends and impressed members of […]

As the Supreme Court hears the case of three Muslim Americans suing the FBI for spying on them, the trio detail how the operation tore apart their community During the early 2000s, the Muslim community in Southern California was thriving. While the faith group as a whole was dealing with a deluge of Islamophobic attacks […]

Mohamed Bahe tries not to remember the overwhelming pain he felt the night he learned a volunteer with his organization, Muslims Giving Back, was a paid informant for the New York City Police Department. In 2011, Bahe, a Muslim American whose family came to the U.S. from Algeria, had spent months kickstarting his community volunteer […]

A police intelligence officer fabricated reports about a terrorism informant in a highly classified database after allegedly being instructed to by superiors, The Times has learnt. The rogue special branch unit, linked with MI5, that the detective constable worked for was disbanded after he retrospectively altered intelligence reports Phil Moran, a counterterrorism agent handler at […]

In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces […]

The scene was a familiar one as warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum jetted into northern Afghanistan this week — a promise of bloodshed and vengeance, and no apology for his vicious past. Despite a series of war crimes linked to his forces, the Afghan government is hoping Dostum’s military acumen and seething hatred of the Taliban […]

“We must be accountable to the crisis we helped create.” Four days after Taliban-controlled Kabul fell to the United States and its military allies in 2001, First Lady Laura Bush took over the mic for her husband’s customary weekly radio address. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of […]

Afghan strike forces backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have committed abuses “amounting to war crimes”, according to a new report. Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleges the troops “committed summary executions and other grave abuses without accountability”. These include extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and attacks on healthcare facilities. Afghanistan’s government told the BBC […]

“This Is What Winning Looks Like” is a disturbing feature documentary about the ineptitude, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and corruption of the Afghan security forces, as well as the reduced role of US Marines due to the troop withdrawal. In February 2013, on his last day at the helm of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General […]

Last spring, the remains of 10 missing Afghan villagers were dug up outside a U.S. Special Forces base – was it a war crime or just another episode in a very dirty war? In the fall of 2012, a team of American Special Forces arrived in Nerkh, a district of Wardak province, Afghanistan, which lies […]

After a U.S.-backed warlord killed hundreds of Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan, the Bush administration quashed inquiries, say government officials and human rights advocates. After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts […]

Again, due to the treason of fundamentalist hangmen, our people have been caught in the claws of the monster of a vast war and destruction. America, by forming an international coalition against Osama and his Taliban-collaborators and in retaliation for the 11th September terrorist attacks, has launched a vast aggression on our country. Despite the […]

On September 11, 2001 the world was stunned with the horrific terrorist attacks on the United States. RAWA stands with the rest of the world in expressing our sorrow and condemnation for this barbaric act of violence and terror. RAWA had already warned that the United States should not support the most treacherous, most criminal, […]

In Egypt, arms giant Dassault, a subsidiary of Thales, and the company Nexa Technologies sold a mass surveillance system to the dictatorship of Field Marshal Sisi. With the blessing of the French state. “Happy birthday” greetings pour in on Ahmed Alaa’s phone. On October 1, 2017, sitting in the back of a taxi in the […]

The site continued to publish new secrets in what it called “Egypt Papers” (Mohamed Al-Shahed/AFP) The Egyptian authorities blocked the investigative website, Disclose, hours after it published an investigation into France’s involvement in intelligence assistance to Egypt, which led to the targeting of civilians on the Libyan border. On Wednesday, the website continued to publish […]

An investigation into the sale of surveillance technologies to Libya and Egypt has led to charges against leaders at one company. Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company’s sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. While […]

Current and former executives at two French technology companies have been charged with complicity in torture for selling surveillance equipment to Libya and Egypt that was used to track down opponents, who were then detained and tortured. Investigating magistrates in the war crimes unit of the Paris tribunal have charged the former chief of Amesys, […]

EFF has grave concerns about the health of Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad, who has now been on hunger strike for 57 days.  Sanad’s retrial was scheduled for October 13, but was postponed.  Sanad, who was sentenced in April by a military court to three years in prison on charges of insulting the military on […]

The Atlantic Council: “State cyber capabilities are increasingly abiding by the “pay-to-play” model—both US/NATO allies and adversaries can purchase interception and intrusion technologies from private firms for intelligence and surveillance purposes. NSO Group has repeatedly made headlines in 2021 for targeting government entities in cyberspace, but there are many more companies selling similar products that are just […]

State cyber capabilities are increasingly abiding by the “pay-to-play” model—both US/NATO allies and adversaries can purchase interception and intrusion technologies from private firms for intelligence and surveillance purposes. NSO Group has repeatedly made headlines in 2021 for targeting government entities in cyberspace, but there are many more companies selling similar products that are just as detrimental. These […]

The controversial Swedish forensic technology company MSAB receives harsh criticism in a new research report published by the American think tank Atlantic Council. The reason is that the company has marketed its cutting-edge products in the authoritarian countries of China and Russia. – It is surprising that they market themselves so aggressively in Russia, says […]

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other tech firms are spending more than €97m on lobbying the EU each year, a new report has revealed. The amount being spent by the tech sector on lobbying the EU is far greater than that spent by the pharma, fossil fuels and finance sectors, according to the report by […]

As Big Tech’s market power grew, so did its political clout. Now, as the EU tries to rein in the most problematic aspects of Big Tech – from disinformation, targeted advertising to unfair competition practices – the digital giants are lobbying hard to shape new regulations. In ‘The Lobby Network’, Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol […]