QOSMOS, Crypton, DETICA and ALTRON all sound like names out of a science fiction thriller.  But the hackers at WikiLeaks say that although we may be unfamiliar with these strange names, they represent companies tapped into the intimate details of our lives.  And they’re sharing what they know with  governments around the world.

The ‘hacktivist’ group has released a tranche of 287 documents in an interactive map of government surveillance practices called the “Spy Files.”  The documents, the first batch of “hundreds,” reveal  the “mass surveillance industry” many governments sponsor, according to the secretive organization’s website.

WikiLeaks and privacy watchdogs Bugged Planet and Privacy International teamed with a number of media outlets including the Washington Post, the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Hindu, to expose 160 “Western intelligence contractors” who have proliferated since Sept. 11, 2001.

The documents released today are mostly from the period between 2006 and 2011.

Serbian Minister of Justice Snezana Malovic and the Macedonian Minister of Justice Blerim Bedzeti signed a bilateral extradition agreement, which will permit the extradition of citizens indicted for organized crime, money laundering and corruption, as well as the extradition of those sentenced to at least two years in prison.

The agreement, signed at a regional conference in Belgrade on Tuesday, should make it more difficult for organized crime groups to operate across borders of the two former Yugoslav republics, and it will prevent criminals from using their citizenships to avoid prosecution. The extradition agreement comes at a time when both countries are battling organized crime groups that traffic illegal immigrants from Asian and African countries through the Balkans and into the European Union.

Bulgaria’s Justice Minister Margarita Popova will be forced to resign in the coming month so that the government in power can renege on some of its commitments related to organized crime and corruption, including a bill that would facilitate asset confiscation, reports the Sofia News Agency (SNA).

Popova is a member of the center-right GERB party and will assume the vice presidency in January.  Sources close to SNA say that this is an attempt to backpedal on the reforms Popova attempted.

The outgoing minister has pushed for a number of amendments and bills including one that wound mandate inquiries into and seizure of unexplained wealth worth more than BGN 150,000 (just over US$100,000).

Real Estate billboards in Russian pepper Montenegro’s coastal highway and chatter in Russian is often heard at seaside resorts and cafes.  But just who are these Russians who have been flocking to this wild part of the Adriatic coast?

Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in partnership with OCCRP conducted an investigation into some of the small country’s newest landowners as part of an investigation into Russian wealth in Montenegro.

The second part of the series, entitled “Gnomes of Montenegro” details the costs of the property and villas that Russian government officials and company heads have purchased on the Adriatic Sea coast.

The investigation, published in Russian, shows how a Russian national convicted of rape and theft has been brokering real estate deals in Montenegro.  It also connects Russia’s first lady Svetlana Medvedeva, and other high level ministers and government officials to properties worth hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of euros.

This Monday the prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office argued against a motion for retrial filed by the defense team of Viktor Bout, a Russian businessman and former Soviet Air Force officer convicted in the US for conspiring to sell weapons to a terrorist organization and kill US citizens. He was found guilty on November 2 by a jury. The prosecutors said that Bout’s lead defense lawyer Albert Dayan failed to present “clear, strong, substantial and incontrovertible evidence” that jurors had been influenced by outside media, and that the motion for a retrial is thus unfounded.

Bribes are meant to be secret, right?  So getting concrete data on bribes and their beneficiaries poses tremendous challenges to prosecutors and anti-corruption watchdogs, making it hard to know what kind of punishment should be meted out.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the joint World Bank/UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative have proposed a standardized rubric for measuring the proceeds of active bribes all over the world in a new report released Monday afternoon.  Government officials found guilty of bribery can be sanctioned in most countries through a legal system, but that process is less formalized when it comes to the beneficiaries of the bribes. Their profits are often many times higher than the bribe itself.

“A countries’ ability to seize and confiscate the gains from bribery is integral to the international fight against bribery and corruption,” Mark Pieth, the chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery said in a press release.  Pieth was appointed the Chairman of FIFA’s independent Good Governance Committee last week.  He said that all countries that are party to the UN Convention Against Corruption and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention are required to undertake these tasks.

Serbian authorities arrested 17 individuals Tuesday in multiple cities across Serbia   on charges of human trafficking. The suspects are accused of operating as an organized crime group to smuggle several hundred illegal immigrants through Serbia from July to mid-November this year. The immigrants, mostly from Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other African and Asian countries, paid the alleged traffickers between €100,000 and €120,000 for passage to Hungary.  Prosecutors say the organized crime group used the money to buy luxury cars and real-estate.

The Cayman Islands’ premier may be criminally charged early next year, according to the Miami-based newsletter Offshore Alert.  Prime Minister McKeeva Bush is under investigation for allegedly accepting bribes from a real estate developer, according to the financial watchdog.

The charges would center on allegations of “financial irregularities” as early as 2004 unearthed in an investigation that started late last year.  Bush allegedly accepted  money from Stan Thomas, a U.S.- based property developer,  in exchange for Bush’s help rezoning property.  According to the newsletter, Bush allegedly sought US$750,000 from Thomas, but the businessman did not want to pay more than half of the property’s value “out of principle.”

A Bulgarian-Austrian network of human traffickers who forced women into prostitution has been busted by a joint force of Bulgarian and Austrian law enforcement, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry announced Tuesday.

Four men and three women suspected of involvement in the group have been arrested as the result of an investigation that began in September 2010, when Austrian police learned that sexual services were for sale at a “studio” in Vienna.  Austrian authorities brought in the Bulgarian police immediately upon learning that the establishment’s employees were primarily Bulgarian.

Women were lured and deceived by men who pretended to be their partners and asked them to prostitute themselves to make money to start a family, according to the Sofia News Agency.  Following their arrival in Austria, they were forced into prostitution.  Prosecutors say that among the trafficked women, one girl is under 18 and another is mentally handicapped.  Men who had been trafficked told investigators they were made to beg on the streets of Austria’s capital Vienna.

A judge Saturday sentenced 110 members of the Italian mafia group ‘Ndrangheta to a total 1,000 years of jail time at the culmination of a yearlong trial before a Milan court.

Defendants jeered and booed both the judge and their attorneys as the sentences were handed down against members of the Calabria criminal group that has made inroads into northern Italy through drug trafficking and other criminal activity.

Alessandro Manno and Cosimo Barranca, the dons of two families operating in northern Italy received 16 and 14 years respectively, the harshest sentences handed down.