The AP just broke [this story:
Apparently the fake Twitter thing also collected personal data on every person who used it.
I don’t think this is going to help our relations with Cuba (or the rest of the world, for that matter).
Oh, and there’s this bit:
There are times when I am not proud of my country. This is one of those times.
I’m surprised at your surprise. Cuba is technically our enemy, and fomenting dissent within our enemy’s borders is something that’s been going on for longer than the United States has been a country.
The story isn’t going to get any traction - it apparently started in 2009. Nor should it.
Gosh, wouldn’t that be awful?
Regards,
Shodan
As a matter of fact, it would/will be. We are going to have to normalize relations with Cuba sometime, and the better the people there feel about the US the smoother that normalization will be. Something like this was totally unnecessary and terribly counterproductive. No matter how it may seem sometimes, the Castros aren’t immortal. We can wait them out if necessary.
Exactly.
In fact, I’d be alright with our enticing their population openly.
But doing it secretly just seems to confirm some of the worst characterizations of the US and prolly undermines any trust that might have been felt by the Cuban population.
Missed the edit window:
For instance, if the ZunZuneo service had just been as advertised, it’s popularity would have built trust with the US once it was known that USAID had (partly?) financed it. Here was something the US brought to Cuba that made people’s lives better. Instead, it will now be seen as a ruse, not designed to make Cubans lives better at all, but designed to ultimately make them subject to our laws. Losing the PR battles is important; wars are won & people conquered through cultural assimilation, not violence.
That’s a fair point. If it had been openly provided as a US gov’t program, extolling the virtues of freedom of speech and open communication, that would have potentially has value in showing the virtues of the US. Instead, the US just looks like one more untrustworthy government.
So come the revolution, they are going to hate the US because we set them up a Twitter account? Uh-huh.
Regards,
Shodan
I was hoping Cuba would trust us someday after Castro dies, but small chance now.
The State Department still has a secret about Cuba hidden in it’s files … I wonder when it will be revealed?
This is disgusting. Even Cuba should not be subjected to the affront to language and decency that is Twitter.
I am also shocked that we are messing around there, but I approve of it. If only we could land some covert troops somewhere, like an inlet? No, an estuary? I got it! A bay! They might get hungry when they get there. Bacon is always good. But heavy. Where can we find natural source of bacon? Here!
This happens. People in (Afghanistan? One of the explody -stans) have rejected vaccine programs because they thought the US was poisoning them or something.
And because at least one of the doctors involved was outed after the operation to kill Osama bin Laden as a fraud who didn’t actually vaccinate people, but was just a US spy.
Right, but these are multiple incidents. It’s hard to find the before/after, although they are using other justifications for terror besides spying.
From the outside the constant animosity against Cuba is baffling, the actual population I’ve interacted with is HUNGRY for the outside world like the USA, and hate Cuba more than anyone.
As I hear it, many Cuban who used this service are now concerned that they might get in trouble for using this service that was (unbeknownst to them) run by US intelligence. According to a BBC report, however, nearly all the traffic on it was completely innocent and apolitical (which means that fromteh US perspective, it was a complete waste of effort).
Also, from the same BBC report, the US government is saying that although the operation, and the fact that US intelligence was behind it, was a secret, it was not “covert”.
:rolleyes:
US intelligence was involved in a covert operation against an enemy state? Stop the presses!
This is the biggest scandal since that time the government got caught sending troops into Germany.
Lots of countries do this to each other. Even our allies.
Sometimes, when siting down and watching tv in the safety of my home, I wonder… am I a CIA plant engineered to topple Cuba’s communist government?..
…but such things are best left unpondered…
…so nobody’s impressed that the govt managed to set up an operational website?
Hahaha
orcenio, why don’t you play a game of solitaire?
It is certainly atypical to see the words “US government” and “mastermind” in the same sentence. And to be fair, this doesn’t seem to have achieved the intended result. However, like any massive bureaucracy, there are a few pearls hidden amongst the swine.
As for the effort itself, if the story is true it is less a question of the ethics of espionage and fermenting unrest–which is always unethical and everybody does it–but that it was done in a manner to subvert the controls and oversight which are intended to assure that such operations are done within (or at least external to) US laws, do not violate the rights of US citizens, are proportional and have appropriate goals, et cetera. Of course, supporters want to now redefine the language to say that we’ve secretly replaced definition of “covert” with “discreet” so that the program was not subject to executive or Congressional oversight. Hmm, let’s use our hidden cameras to take a look. From the article:
*But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said they had known nothing about the effort, which one of them described as “dumb, dumb, dumb.” A showdown with that senator’s panel is expected next week, and the Republican chairman of a House oversight subcommittee said that it, too, would look into the program.
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It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under U.S. law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president as well as congressional notification. White House spokesman Jay Carney said he was not aware of individuals in the White House who had known about the program.
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“We also offered to brief our appropriators and our authorizers,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. She added that she was hearing on Capitol Hill that many people support these kinds of democracy promotion programs. And some lawmakers did speak up on that subject. But by late Thursday no members of Congress had acknowledged being aware of the Cuban Twitter program earlier than this week.
Harf described the program as “discreet” but said it was in no way classified or covert. Harf also said the project, dubbed ZunZuneo, did not rise to a level that required the secretary of state to be notified. Neither former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton nor John Kerry, the current occupant of the office, was aware of ZunZuneo, she said.
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At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the USAID’s longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and the details could undermine the agency’s mission to deliver aid to the world’s poor and vulnerable - an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.
Leahy and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said they were unaware of ZunZuneo.
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“That is not what USAID should be doing,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform National Security Subcommittee. “USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished.”
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USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington’s ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project.
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ZunZuneo was publicly launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use.
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ZunZuneo’s organizers wanted the social network to grow slowly to avoid detection by the Cuban government. Eventually, documents and interviews reveal, they hoped the network would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize “smart mobs” - mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice - that could trigger political demonstrations, or "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."
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The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, public government data show, but those documents don’t reveal where the funds were actually spent.
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Executives set up a corporation in Spain and an operating company in the Cayman Islands - a well-known British offshore tax haven - to pay the company’s bills so the “money trail will not trace back to America,” a strategy memo said. Disclosure of that connection would have been a catastrophic blow, they concluded, because it would undermine the service’s credibility with subscribers and get it shut down by the Cuban government.*
Sounds like a covert operation to me. In fact, this is pretty much the exact kind of deal which had Reagan testifying to his lack of memory years before he acknowledged suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Lack of oversight, using USAID (which is pretty well acknowledged as being the intelligence arm of the State Department, but still its ostensible mission is to aid and support developing nations, not run a fucking spy shop), shell companies and money laundering; are these not things that people making the laws and distributing funding should be aware of?
Regardless of what you think of Cuba, or whether the US should be undermining their government, it is pretty clear that there are some very shady things going on with USAID. That we are all “shocked, shocked!” to hear that a government agency is spying on another opposing nation is not the story here; it is that this is being done in a manner which is at best extralegal and quite possible completely illicit, at the same time that we’re facing a newly aggressive Russian Federation, competition with the Peoples Republic of China, et cetera. Parallels to the excesses of the Cold War not not a far stretch.
Stranger