US tried to build fake "Cuban twitter" to stir unrest against Cuban government during Obama admin., ran fake internet sites, sought help from Twitter's Jack Dorsey-AP, 4/3/2014

“Suzanne Hall, then a State Department official working on [then Sec. of State Hillary] 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.” [paragraph 18]. The project ran from 2009 to mid 2012.…US “recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project.”

4/3/2014, “U.S. secretly built ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest," Associated Press via Politico

“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.”…

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….[paragraph 18]

At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, 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.”…

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, The Associated Press has learned.

The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba’s stranglehold on the Internet….First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people;

then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.

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.

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 USAID 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.

At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the U.S. Agency for International Development’s longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions….

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….

The project, dubbed “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….

USAID told the AP that ZunZuneo stopped in September 2012 when a government grant ended.”...

“Contributing to this report were Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur and AP writers Lara Jakes, Deb Riechmann and Donna Cassata in Washington, and AP writers Andrea Rodriguez and Peter Orsi in Havana. Arce reported from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.”

 

 

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