It appears the U.S. government is doing its best to ensure that nobody anywhere in any corner of planet earth will ever trust American technology again (or U.S. aid for that matter). This process of distrust first really got going with the Edward Snowden revelations, which demonstrated that essentially all major U.S. tech firms are mere wards of the state with little to no privacy protections, and absolutely zero backbone.
This story of the U.S. government covertly creating a “Cuban Twitter” called ZunZuneo in order to overthrow the regime there has enormous long-term ramifications on many, many levels, which I will address throughout this post.
From the AP via The Washington Post:
WASHINGTON — In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government.
McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the U.S. government.
McSpedon didn’t work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian aid.
Now we can pretty much guarantee that foreign nations will forever be skeptical of any U.S. “aid”. Great work morons.
Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”
At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.
“There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,” according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the project’s contractors. “This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission.”
The program’s legality is unclear: U.S. law requires that any covert action by a federal agency must have a presidential authorization. Officials at USAID would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it. McSpedon, the most senior official named in the documents obtained by the AP, is a mid-level manager who declined to comment.
“The program’s legality is unclear”, as if that matters!
But the ZunZuneo program muddies those claims, a sensitive issue for its mission to promote democracy and deliver aid to the world’s poor and vulnerable — which requires the trust of foreign governments.
The Associated Press obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project’s development. The AP independently verified the project’s scope and details in the documents — such as federal contract numbers and names of job candidates — through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those directly involved in ZunZuneo.
“We should gradually increase the risk,” USAID proposed in a document. It advocated using “smart mobs” only in “critical/opportunistic situations and not at the detriment of our core platform-based network.”
USAID’s team of contractors and subcontractors built a companion Web site to its text service so Cubans could subscribe, give feedback and send their own text messages for free. They talked about how to make the Web site look like a real business. “Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise,” a proposal suggested.
McSpedon worked for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape.
We have an “Office of Transition Initiatives“? Who knew…
In 2009, a report by congressional researchers warned that OTI’s work “often lends itself to political entanglements that may have diplomatic implications.” Staffers on oversight committees complained that USAID was running secret programs and would not provide details.
“We were told we couldn’t even be told in broad terms what was happening because ‘people will die,’” said Fulton Armstrong, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Before that, he was the US intelligence community’s most senior analyst on Latin America, advising the Clinton White House.
How’s that for Congressional oversight. This phony “people will die” rationale seems to be the reason for all shady secret programs these days.
The money that Creative Associates spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, government data show. But there is no indication of where the funds were actually spent.
Paula Cambronero, a researcher for Mobile Accord, began building a vast database about the Cuban subscribers, including gender, age, “receptiveness” and “political tendencies.” USAID believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programs and “maximize our possibilities to extend our reach.”
Of course, the NSA would never compile such data domestically, right?
Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a lawyer specializing in European data protection law, said it appeared that the U.S. program violated Spanish privacy laws because the ZunZuneo team had illegally gathered personal data from the phone list and sent unsolicited emails using a Spanish platform. “The illegal release of information is a crime, and using information to create a list of people by political affiliation is totally prohibited by Spanish law,” Almeida said. It would violate a U.S-European data protection agreement, he said.
“If it is discovered that the platform is, or ever was, backed by the United States government, not only do we risk the channel being shut down by Cubacel, but we risk the credibility of the platform as a source of reliable information, education, and empowerment in the eyes of the Cuban people,” Mobile Accord noted in a memo.
To cover their tracks, they decided to have a company based in the United Kingdom set up a corporation in Spain to run ZunZuneo. A separate company called MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account at the island’s Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Ltd. to pay the bills.
A memo of the meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from any U.S. ownership so that the “money trail will not trace back to America.”
Officials at USAID realized however, that they could not conceal their involvement forever — unless they left the stage. The predicament was summarized bluntly when Eberhard was in Washington for a strategy session in early February 2011, where his company noted the “inherent contradiction” of giving Cubans a platform for communications uninfluenced by their government that was in fact financed by the U.S. government and influenced by its agenda.
They turned to Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, to seek funding for the project. Documents show Dorsey met with Suzanne Hall, a State Department officer who worked on social media projects, and others. Dorsey declined to comment.
This is not going to be good for Twitter’s reputation internationally, or Facebook for that matter…
By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord’s failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the U.S. government. The operation had run into an unsolvable problem. USAID was paying tens of thousands of dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba’s communist telecommunications monopoly routed through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that it could either afford or justify — and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or worse.
If you did this it’d probably be called money laundering and you’d be locked up in a cage forever. Such as what happened to Charlie Shrem.
Toward the middle of 2012, Cuban users began to complain that the service worked only sporadically. Then not at all.
ZunZuneo vanished as mysteriously as it appeared.
Call me crazy, but it might be better idea to end the embargo if we want to foster a “market economy” in Cuba. No, that would be way too enlightened and rational. Better to covertly attempt to spark a revolution that could spiral in impossible to know directions…
Meanwhile, we are encouraging people out in the streets in other countries, while brutally cracking down on domestic protests by labeling Occupy Wall Street demonstrators as “terrorists”.
At the end of the day, would it be so horrible if the U.S. government wanted to foster greater social media communication for Cubans? No, not at all. Unfortunately, that is not what it was doing. Rather, we attempted to covertly foster dissent with the expressed purpose of regime change. This will only encourage an arms race of this sort of activity from all governments against one another all over the world.
This revelation will serve to sow further distrust across the globe, both for American humanitarian intentions and American technology generally. Besides, don’t we have enough problems internally to focus on. Why do we seem to be allocating so many taxpayer resources abroad rather than here at home? As an American, that’s the most disturbing part in all of this to me.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Follow me on Twitter.
1989 Interview with Col. Fletcher Prouty, USAF (Ret)
Ratcliffe: Further on you write about the realization of the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report’s method of placing CIA agents throughout the government:
Many of these people have reached positions of great responsibility. I believe that the most powerful and certainly the most useful agent the CIA has ever had operates in just such a capacity within another branch of the Government, and he has been there for so long that few have any idea that he is a long-term career agent of the CIA. Through his most excellent and skillful services, more CIA operations have been enabled to take place than can be laid at the feet of any other, more “legitimate,” agent.
This was the plan and the wisdom of the [Allen] Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of security he would place people in all areas of the Government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own organizations. This is how the ST [Secret Team] was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be.[12]
The first question I have here would be how “on the basis of security,” would Allen Dulles “place people in all other areas of the government”?
Prouty: When I was assigned to the Air Force Headquarters, in 1955, the Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White directed me to create an office “to provide the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA” in accordance with the provisions of the National Security Council Directive #5412 of March 15, 1954, and to operate as the Pentagon “Focal Point Office for the CIA.”
As Mr. Dulles told me later, “I do not want various people from my agency going into the Pentagon and dealing with different people there and therefore exposing the activities of the CIA to a large number of people, because obviously such a ring would then proliferate to others and if they wanted submarines, they would have to bring in some navy people and if they wanted helicopters, they would have to talk to some army people.” He said, “I want a focal point. I want an office that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But the system will not be aware of what initiated the request — they’ll think it came from the Secretary of Defense. They won’t realize it came from the Director of Central Intelligence.”
The Dulles philosophy was to control the focal point area. This then led to the creation of focal point offices everywhere. As I established this “Tab-6” organization, as we called it, in every major staff area within the Air Force (because that was my jurisdiction at the time), I would “clear” people — another focal point, you might say a sub-focal point — a person I could go to who had been given, ahead of time, the authority to do whatever it was that he was authorized to do. We stressed this was only for “authorized” business — he would have to be sure he had orders, either from my office or directly up to the Chief of Staff, and that we knew what we were doing for CIA.
This leads to another step, of what you might call “breeding”. We had to work with various agencies of the government, not just the Defense Department. We had to have contact points in the State Department, in the FAA, in the Customs Service, in the Treasury, in the FBI and all around through the government — up in the White House. Gradually we wove a network of people who understood the symbols and the code names and the activities we were doing, and how we handled money which was the most important part. Then we began to assign people there who, those agencies thought, were from the Defense Department. But they actually were people that we put there from the CIA.
This led to the creation of a system of powerful individuals — people whose jobs were quite dominant in some of these other agencies. Especially after they’d been there two or three years, because we put them in there by talking to the top man, the cabinet officer or the head of the agency. We would say, “This man is being placed here so that he can facilitate covert activities and so that he can retain the secrecy that’s required and he will keep you informed at all times.” Well, in the over-all U.S. bureaucracy, the top people tend to move from one job to another faster than anybody else, not the career people who are there for a life-time. So the man we had explained the “Focal Point” structure to, perhaps a year-and-a-half earlier, would be transferred or leave the government. But our trained and fully cleared “Focal Point” man was still there. So after one or two cycles of this, that agency might not even know that employee was our man and not actually theirs because they would have no record of his special assignment, of what his origins were. They would think he was just another one of their own employees.
As a result, he became extremely effective. Because if we wanted something done — I remember a very sensitive operation that I needed some information on, and I needed it from the FBI. I didn’t go to the FBI. I went to this guy that we had planted, and he got it twice as fast and in a much better form than I would have gotten it from the FBI, even though I was at that time working for the office of the Secretary of Defense. We had no trouble working with the FBI. This process was just to facilitate it and conceal the CIA role. These people became very, very adept.
By the same token, people that were bona fide employees of CIA (agents), were assigned even into the office of the Secretary of Defense. We had certain people there who were CIA employees — Ed Lansdale worked for CIA all his adult career. A person named Frank Hand worked there. But the people in the Pentagon thought they were ordinary military employees. They didn’t realize they were CIA.
To give you an example: Colonel Lansdale was a full colonel in the Air Force — that was his cover story. And he had been a full colonel for a few years. And the Air Force was promoting some men to general. The question came up, would Lansdale be eligible? I told Mr. Dulles personally, I said, “You can make Lansdale a general if you just write a letter to General Lemay, because you’re going to pay the bills anyway and not the Air Force.”
A few days later I got a call from General Lemay’s office. He called me in and he had the list of men that the Air Force was promoting to general, and as I recall, it was 13 or 14 officers. General Lemay knew every one of them intimately except one. He said, “Prouty, I understood you know who this guy Lansdale is.” He said, “I don’t know who the hell he is. I’m not going to promote him to a general.” And I said, “Well, don’t you have a file on him?” He said, “Yes.” He opened it up and the top letter was from Allen Dulles. I said, “He’s a very important man for Allen Dulles.” He said, “OK, I’ll promote him.” Just like that. That’s a good way to get a promotion, you see. But that created a very important job within the structure of the office of the Secretary of Defense.
Frank Hand had been there for years in the same way. Frank was a civilian of outstanding ability. I always wrote that he was the most important agent that the agency had because he was operating daily and effectively as a member of the office of the Secretary of Defense. You can just imagine the things that a person in that capacity can do when his home base is really CIA. Although people rarely believe this when they first hear it, there are assignments like that in the White House; there are assignments like that in the State Department. For instance, it’s hard to tell the difference, between Bill Bundy who was a long-time CIA employee and his brother McGeorge Bundy who was in the White House with Kennedy. The two brothers certainly are going to act side-by-side — they have the same goals and the same intentions. There were many instances that duplicated like that.
It wasn’t long — I’d say by the end of the fifties or early sixties — before we had spread through the government what I called a Secret Team, a group of people who really knew how to operate the CIA business through the boundless maze of the United States government.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp2_p1.html
“Now we can pretty much guarantee that foreign nations will forever be skeptical of any U.S. “aid”. Great work morons.”
As far as I know, no one who pays attention has trusted US “aid” for many, many years.
gjh is right, NO ONE trusts uSSa if theyre above IQ of 60.
even allies get treated like crap spied on and screwed on trade and other deals.
were pretty p’d off about it.
Koch brothers and Monsanto to block GMO labeling laws
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_04_04/Bill-backed-by-Koch-brothers-and-Monsanto-to-block-GMO-labeling-laws-in-US-4042/