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<h1 class="articleOpinion-title articleWidth-title">U.S. secretly built
‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest</h1>
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<p class="articleOpinion-standfirst article-standfirst">Program
spearheaded by USAID sought to evade Cuba’s stranglehold on Internet
and push users toward dissent</p>
<div class="articleOpinion-dateByline article-dateByline">
<div class="articleOpinion-dateTime article-dateTime"> <span
class="date">April 3, 2014</span> <span class="time">7:43AM ET</span>
<span class="date updated separator">Updated 4:12PM ET</span> </div>
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<p>The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter"
— a communications network designed to undermine the communist
government in Cuba — built with secret shell companies and financed
through foreign banks, according to The Associated Press.</p>
<p>The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of
thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the
Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network
would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was
to push them toward dissent.</p>
<p>Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a U.S. agency
with ties to the State Department nor that American contractors were
gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information
might be used someday for political purposes.</p>
<p>It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under U.S. law, which
requires written authorization of covert action by the president and
congressional notification. Officials at the U.S. Agency for
International Development would not say who had approved the program or
whether the White House was aware of it. The Cuban government declined
a request for comment.</p>
<p>White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the program was a
"development assistance" scheme designed to allow Cubans facing
government restrictions on information access to civil society and was
not a secret.</p>
<p>He said the program, first reported by the Associated Press, was
conducted within the bounds of U.S. law, and had not been a secret
since it was debated in Congress.</p>
<p>"When you have a program like that in a non permissive environment,
i.e. a place like Cuba, you are discreet (in) how you implement it so
you protect the practitioners," he said.</p>
<p>"But that does not make it covert. USAID is a development agency,
not an intelligence agency. Suggestions that this was a covert program
are wrong."</p>
<p>At minimum, details of the program appear to muddy USAID's
longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and 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.</p>
<p>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 other countries to
hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they
would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project.</p>
<p>"There will be absolutely no mention of United States government
involvement," according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord, one of the
project's creators. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term
success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission."</p>
<p>The project, dubbed ZunZuneo, slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet,
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.</p>
<p>USAID said in a statement that it is "proud of its work in Cuba to
provide basic humanitarian assistance, promote human rights and
fundamental freedoms, and to help information flow more freely to the
Cuban people," who it said "have lived under an authoritarian regime"
for 50 years. The agency said its work was found to be "consistent with
U.S. law."</p>
<p>Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations
Committee's State Department and foreign operations subcommittee, said
the ZunZuneo revelations were troubling.</p>
<p>"There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who
had no idea this was a U.S. government-funded activity," he said.
"There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed
to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And
there is the fact that it was apparently activated shortly after Alan
Gross, a USAID subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide
citizens access to the Internet, was arrested."</p>
<p>The AP obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the
project's development. It independently verified the project's scope
and details in the documents through publicly available databases,
government sources and interviews with those involved in ZunZuneo.</p>
<p>The project would seem to be a throwback to the Cold War and the
decades-long struggle between the United States and Cuba. It came at a
time when the historically sour relationship between the countries had
improved, at least marginally, and Cuba had made tentative steps toward
a more market-based economy.</p>
<p>The social media project began development in 2009 after
Washington-based Creative Associates International obtained a
half-million Cuban cellphone numbers. It was unclear how the numbers
were obtained, although documents indicate it was done illicitly from a
key source inside the country's state-run provider. Project organizers
used those numbers to start a subscriber base.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>The Cuban government has a tight grip on information, and the
country's leaders view the Internet as a "wild colt" that "should be
tamed." ZunZuneo's leaders planned to push Cuba "out of a stalemate
through tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition
process going again toward democratic change."</p>
<p>At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, then–Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. helps people in "oppressive
Internet environments get around filters." Noting Tunisia's role in the
Arab Spring, she said people used technology to help "fuel a movement
that led to revolutionary change."</p>
<p>Suzanne Hall, then a State Department official working on Clinton's
social media efforts, helped spearhead an attempt to get Twitter
founder Jack Dorsey to take over the ZunZuneo project. Dorsey declined
to comment.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>ZunZuneo's organizers worked hard to create a network that looked
like a legitimate business, including the creation of a companion
website — and marketing campaign — so users could subscribe and send
their own text messages to groups of their choice.</p>
<p>"Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial
enterprise," one written proposal said. Behind the scenes, ZunZuneo's
computers were also storing and analyzing subscribers' messages and
other demographic information, 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."</p>
<p>"It was such a marvelous thing," said Ernesto Guerra, a Cuban user
who never suspected his beloved network had ties to Washington. "How
was I supposed to realize that?" Guerra asked in an interview in
Havana. "It's not like there was a sign saying, 'Welcome to ZunZuneo,
brought to you by USAID.'"</p>
<p>Executives set up a corporation in Spain and an operating company in
the Cayman Islands — well known as a British offshore tax haven — to
pay the company's bills so the "money trail will not trace back to
America," a strategy memo said. That would have been a catastrophic
blow, they concluded, because it would undermine the service's
credibility with subscribers and get shut down by the Cuban government.</p>
<p>Similarly, subscribers' messages were funneled through two other
countries, but never through American-based computer servers.</p>
<p>Denver-based Mobile Accord considered at least a dozen candidates to
head the European front company. One candidate, Francoise de Valera,
told the AP she was told nothing about Cuba or U.S. involvement.</p>
<p>James Eberhard, Mobile Accord's CEO and a key player in the
project's development, declined to comment. Creative Associates
referred questions to USAID.</p>
<p>For more than two years, ZunZuneo grew and reached at least 40,000
subscribers. But documents reveal the team found evidence that Cuban
officials tried to trace the text messages and break into the ZunZuneo
system. USAID told the AP that the project stopped in September 2012
when a government grant ended.</p>
<p>ZunZuneo vanished abruptly, and the Communist Party remains in power
— with no Cuban Spring on the horizon.</p>
<p>"The moment when ZunZuneo disappeared, [it] was like a vacuum," said
Guerra, the ZunZuneo user. "In the end, we never learned what happened.
We never learned where it came from."</p>
<p><i>Al Jazeera and wire services</i></p>
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