Obama created fake twitter-like network including fake ads to incite Cuban ‘smart mobs’ to rise up and overthrow Cuban government, 2009-2012. He used US tax dollars, Cayman Islands bank, illegal operations in Spain, servers in Spain and Ireland-AP, 4/3/2014…(Thanks to Obama, in 2017 US diplomats in Cuba reported brain damaging audio attacks)

“The US [Obama administration] created an entire fake social network for Cubans that aimed to stir unrest and overthrow the Cuban government, according to the [AP story] published in the Guardian (4/3/14).”
 
Obama used a Cayman Islands bank account to hide operations, front companies included an illegal one in Spain. Obama’s attempted coup guaranteed that Cuba would harm innocent Americans in return. American diplomats dumb enough to go to Cuba after Obama’s attacks should’ve expected brain damaging audio attacks among other things. Of note, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is mentioned in this article as having met with multiple persons in Hillary Clinton State Dept. regarding his possible interest in becoming involved with the US online operation to undermine the Cuban government. Article says Dorsey had no comment.

4/3/2014, “US secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest and undermine government,“ AP in Washington via UK Guardian 

“USAid started ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, in hope it could be used to organize ‘smart mobs’ to trigger Cuban spring.”

“In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US 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 US government.

McSpedon didn’t work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,” using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet.

Documents show the US 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 US 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: US 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.

USAid spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last year [2013] and found them to be consistent with US law.

“USAid is a development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world,” he said.

“In the implementation,” he added, “has the government taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That’s how you protect the practitioners and the public. In hostile environments, we often take steps to protect the partners we’re working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba.”

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.

“On the face of it there are several aspects about this that are troubling,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and chairman of the appropriations committee’s State Department and foreign operations subcommittee.

“There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAid subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the Internet, was arrested.”

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.

Taken together, they tell the story of how agents of the US government, working in deep secrecy, became tech entrepreneurs — in Cuba. And it all began with a half a million cellphone numbers obtained from a communist government.

ZunZuneo would seem to be a throwback from 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.

It is unclear whether the plan got its start with USAid or Creative Associates International, a Washington for-profit company that has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in US contracts. But a “key contact” at Cubacel, the state-owned cellphone provider, slipped the phone numbers to a Cuban engineer living in Spain. The engineer provided the numbers to USAid and Creative Associates “free of charge,” documents show.

In mid-2009, Noy Villalobos, a manager with Creative Associates who had worked with USAid in the 1990s on a program to eradicate drug crops, started an IM chat with her little brother in Nicaragua, according to a Creative Associates email that captured the conversation. Mario Bernheim, in his mid-20s, was an up-and-coming techie who had made a name for himself as a computer whiz.

“This is very confidential of course,” Villalobos cautioned her brother. But what could you do if you had all the cellphone numbers of a particular country? Could you send bulk text messages without the government knowing?

“Can you encrypt it or something?” she texted.

She was looking for a direct line to regular Cubans through text messaging. Most had precious little access to news from the outside world. The government viewed the internet as an Achilles’ heel and controlled it accordingly. A communications minister had even referred to it as a “wild colt” that “should be tamed.”

Yet in the years since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, Cuba had sought to jumpstart the long stagnant economy. Raul Castro began encouraging cellphone use, and hundreds of thousands of people were suddenly using mobile phones for the first time, though smartphones with access to the Internet remained restricted.

Cubans could text message, though at a high cost in a country where the average wage was a mere $20 a month.

Bernheim told his sister that he could figure out a way to send instant texts to hundreds of thousands of Cubans— for cheap. It could not be encrypted though, because that would be too complicated. They wouldn’t be able to hide the messages from the Cuban government, which owned Cubacel.

But they could disguise who was sending the texts by constantly switching the countries the messages came from.

“We could rotate it from different countries?” Villalobos asked. 

“Say one message from Nica, another from Spain, another from Mexico”?

Bernheim could do that. “But I would need mirrors set up around the world, mirrors, meaning the same computer, running with the same platform, with the same phone.”

“No hay problema,” he signed off. No problem.
……
After the chat, Creative hired Bernheim as a subcontractor, reporting to his sister. (Villalobos and Bernheim would later confirm their involvement with the ZunZuneo project to AP, but decline further comment.) Bernheim, in turn, signed up the Cuban engineer who had gotten the phone list. The team figured out how to message the masses without detection, but their ambitions were bigger.

Creative Associates envisioned using the list to create a social networking system that would be called “Proyecto ZZ,” or “Project ZZ.” The service would start cautiously and be marketed chiefly to young Cubans, who USAid saw as the most open to political change.

“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 website 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 website look like a real business. “Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise,” a proposal suggested.

In multiple documents, USAid staff pointed out that text messaging had mobilized smart mobs and political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines, among others. In Iran, the USAid noted social media’s role following the disputed election of then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 — and saw it as an important foreign policy tool.

USAid documents say their strategic objective in Cuba was to “push it out of a stalemate through tactical and temporary initiatives, and get the transition process going again towards democratic change.“ Democratic change in authoritarian Cuba meant breaking the Castros’ grip on power.

USAid divided Cuban society into five segments depending on loyalty to the government. On one side sat the “democratic movement,” called “still (largely) irrelevant,” and at the other end were the “hard-core system supporters,” dubbed “Talibanes” in a derogatory comparison to Afghan and Pakistani extremists.

A key question was how to move more people toward the democratic activist camp without detection. Bernheim assured the team that wouldn’t be a problem.

“The Cuban government, like other regimes committed to information control, currently lacks the capacity to effectively monitor and control such a service,” Bernheim wrote in a proposal for USAid marked “Sensitive Information.”

ZunZuneo would use the list of phone numbers to break Cuba’s internet embargo and not only deliver information to Cubans but also let them interact with each other in a way the government could not control. Eventually it would build a system that would let Cubans send messages anonymously among themselves.

At a strategy meeting, the company discussed building “user volume as a cover … for organization,” according to meeting notes. It also suggested that the “Landscape needs to be large enough to hide full opposition members who may sign up for service.”

In a play on the telecommunication minister’s quote,the team dubbed their network the “untamed colt.”

At first, the ZunZuneo team operated out of Central America. Bernheim, the techie brother, worked from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, while McSpedon supervised Creative’s work on ZunZuneo from an office in San Jose, Costa Rica, though separate from the US embassy. It was an unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in Washington, according to US officials. 

McSpedon worked for USAid’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote US interests in quickly changing political environments—without the usual red tape.

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,'” [the usual excuse when running US taxpayer funded illegal operations] 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.

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.

Tensions with Congress spiked just as the ZunZuneo project was gearing up in December 2009, when another USAid program ended in the arrest of the US contractor, Alan Gross. Gross had traveled repeatedly to Cuba on a secret mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology typically available only to governments, a mission first revealed in February 2012 by AP.

At some point, Armstrong says, the foreign relations committee became aware of OTI’s secret operations in Costa Rica. US government officials acknowledged them privately to Armstrong, but USAid refused to provide operational details.

At an event in Washington, Armstrong says he confronted McSpedon, asking him if he was aware that by operating secret programs from a third country, it might appear like he worked for an intelligence agency.

McSpedon, through USAid, said the story is not true. He declined to comment otherwise.
___
On September 20, 2009, thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Colombian rocker Juanes’ “Peace without Borders” concert. It was the largest public gathering in Cuba since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Under the watchful gaze of a giant sculpture of revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Miami-based Juanes promised music aimed at “turning hate into love.”

But for the ZunZuneo team, the concert was a perfect opportunity to test the political power of their budding social network. In the weeks before, Bernheim’s firm, using the phone list, sent out a half a million text messages in what it called “blasts,” to test what the Cuban government would do.

The team hired Alen Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, to write Cuban-style messages. Some were mildly political and comical, others more pointed. One asked respondents whether they thought two popular local music acts out of favor with the government should join the stage with Juanes.  

Some 100,000 people responded — not realizing the poll was used to gather critical intelligence.

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.”

Cambronero concluded that the team had to be careful. “Messages with a humorous connotation should not contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create animosity in the recipients,” she wrote in a report.

Falcon, in an interview, said he was never told that he was composing messages for a US government program, but he had no regrets about his involvement.

“They didn’t tell me anything, and if they had, I would have done it anyway,” he said. “In Cuba they don’t have freedom. While a government forces me to pay in order to visit my country, makes me ask permission, and limits my communications, I will be against it, whether it’s Fidel Castro, (Cuban exile leader) Jorge Mas Canosa or Gloria Estefan,” the Cuban American singer.

Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a lawyer specializing in European data protection law, said it appeared that the US 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 US-European data protection agreement, he said.

USAid saw evidence from server records that Havana had tried to trace the texts, to break into ZunZuneo’s servers, and had occasionally blocked messages. But USAid called the response “timid” and concluded that ZunZuneo would be viable — if its origins stayed secret.

Even though Cuba has one of the most sophisticated counter-intelligence operations in the world, the ZunZuneo team thought that as long as the message service looked benign, Cubacel would leave it alone.

Once the network had critical mass, Creative and USAid documents argued, it would be harder for the Cuban government to shut it down, both because of popular demand and because Cubacel would be addicted to the revenues from the text messages.

In February 2010, the company introduced Cubans to ZunZuneo and began marketing. Within six months, it had almost 25,000 subscribers, growing faster and drawing more attention than the USAid team could control.
___
Saimi Reyes Carmona was a journalism student at the University of Havana when she stumbled onto ZunZuneo. She was intrigued by the service’s novelty, and the price. The advertisement said “free messages” so she signed up using her nickname, Saimita.

At first, ZunZuneo was a very tiny platform, Reyes said during a recent interview in Havana, but one day she went to its website and saw its services had expanded.

“I began sending one message every day,” she said, the maximum allowed at the start. “I didn’t have practically any followers.” She was thrilled every time she got a new one.

And then ZunZuneo exploded in popularity.

“The whole world wanted in, and in a question of months I had 2,000 followers who I have no idea who they are, nor where they came from.”

She let her followers know the day of her birthday, and was surprised when she got some 15 personal messages. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” she told her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra Valdes, also a journalism student.

Before long, Reyes learned she had the second highest number of followers on the island, after a user called UCI, which the students figured was Havana’s University of Computer Sciences. Her boyfriend had 1,000. The two were amazed at the reach it gave them.

“It was such a marvelous thing,” Guerra said. “So noble.” He and Reyes tried to figure out who was behind ZunZuneo, since the technology to run it had to be expensive, but they found nothing. They were grateful though.

“We always found it strange, that generosity and kindness,” he said. ZunZuneo was “the fairy godmother of cellphones.”
___
By early 2010, Creative decided that ZunZuneo was so popular Bernheim’s company wasn’t sophisticated enough to build, in effect, “a scaled down version of Twitter.”

It turned to another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc. Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Eberhard earned millions in his mid-20s when he sold a company that developed cellphone ring tones and games. His company’s website describes him as “a visionary within the global mobile community.”

In July [2010], he flew to Barcelona to join McSpedon, Bernheim, and others to work out what they called a “below the radar strategy.”

“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 NT Butterfield and Son Ltd. to pay the bills.

A memo of the meeting in Barcelona says that the front companies would distance ZunZuneo from any US ownership 

so that
the “money trail will not trace back to America.”

But it wasn’t just the money they were worried about. They had to hide the origins of the texts, according to documents and interviews with team members.

Brad Blanken, the former chief operating officer of Mobile Accord, left the project early on, but noted that there were two main criteria for success.

“The biggest challenge with creating something like this is getting the phone numbers,” Blanken said. “And then the ability to spoof the network.”

The team of contractors set up servers in Spain and Ireland to process texts, contracting an independent Spanish company called Lleida.net to send the text messages back to Cuba, while stripping off identifying data.

Mobile Accord also sought intelligence from engineers at the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, which organizers said would “have knowledge of Cubacel’s network.”

“Understanding the security and monitoring protocols of Cubacel will be an invaluable asset to avoid unnecessary detection by the carrier,” one Mobile Accord memo read.

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 US government
and influenced by its [US] 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.

The State Department under then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton thought social media was an important tool in diplomacy.  

At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, [Mrs.] Clinton said the US helped people in “oppressive Internet environments get around filters.” In Tunisia, she said people used technology to “organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change.”

Ultimately, the solution was new management that could separate ZunZuneo from its US origins and raise enough revenue for it to go “independent,” even as it kept its long-term strategy to bring about “democratic change.”

Eberhard led the recruitment efforts, a sensitive operation because he intended to keep the management of the Spanish company in the dark.

“The ZZ management team will have no knowledge of the true origin of the operation; as far as they know, the platform was established by Mobile Accord,” the memo said. “There should be zero doubt in management’s mind and no insecurities or concerns about United States Government involvement.”

The memo went on to say that the CEO’s clean conscience would be “particularly critical when dealing with Cubacel.” Sensitive to the high cost of text messages for average Cubans, ZunZuneo negotiated a bulk rate for texts at 4 cents a pop through a Spanish intermediary. Documents show there was hope that an earnest, clueless CEO might be able to persuade Cubacel to back the project.

Mobile Accord considered a dozen candidates from five countries to head the Spanish front company. One of them was Francoise de Valera, a CEO who was vacationing in Dubai when she was approached for an interview. She flew to Barcelona. At the luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel, she met with Nim Patel, who at the time was Mobile Accord’s president. Eberhard had also flown in for the interviews. But she said she couldn’t get a straight answer about what they were looking for.

“They talked to me about instant messaging but nothing about Cuba, or the United States,” she told the AP in an interview from London.

“If I had been offered and accepted the role, I believe that sooner or later it would have become apparent to me that something wasn’t right,” she said.
___
By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord’s failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the US 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.

In a searing evaluation, Creative Associates said Mobile Accord had ignored sustainability because “it has felt comfortable receiving USG financing to move the venture forward.”

Out of 60 points awarded for performance, Mobile Accord scored 34 points. Creative Associates complained that Mobile Accord’s understanding of the social mission of the project was weak, and gave it 3 out of 10 points for “commitment to our Program goals.”
Mobile Accord declined to comment on the program.

In increasingly impatient tones, Creative Associates pressed Mobile Accord to find new revenue that would pay the bills. Mobile Accord suggested selling targeted advertisements in Cuba, but even with projections of up to a million ZunZuneo subscribers, advertising in a state-run economy would amount to a pittance.

By March 2011, ZunZuneo had about 40,000 subscribers. To keep a lower profile, it abandoned previous hopes of reaching 200,000 and instead capped the number of subscribers at a lower number. It limited ZunZuneo’s text messages to less than one percent of the total in Cuba, so as to avoid the notice of Cuban authorities. 

Though one former ZunZuneo worker — who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about his work — said the Cubans were catching on and had tried to block the site.
___
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.

By June 2012, users who had access to Facebook and Twitter were wondering what had happened.

“Where can you pick up messages from ZunZuneo?” one woman asked on Facebook in November 2012. “Why aren’t I receiving them anymore?”

Users who went to ZunZuneo’s website were sent to a children’s website with a similar name.

Reyner Aguero, a 25-year-old blogger, said he and fellow students at Havana’s University of Computer Sciences tried to track it down. Someone had rerouted the website through DNS blocking, a censorship technique initially developed back in the 1990s.

Intelligence officers later told the students that ZunZuneo was blacklisted, he said.

“ZunZuneo, like everything else they did not control, was a threat,” Aguero said. “Period.”

In incorrect Spanish, ZunZuneo posted a note on its Facebook page saying it was aware of problems accessing the website and that it was trying to resolve them.

"¡Que viva el ZunZuneo!” the message said. Long live ZunZuneo!
In February [2012], when Saimi Reyes, and her boyfriend, Ernesto Guerra, learned the origins of ZunZuneo, they were stunned.

“How was I supposed to realize that?” Guerra asked. “It’s not like there was a sign saying ‘Welcome to ZunZuneo, brought to you by USAid [US taxpayers].”

“Besides, there was nothing wrong. If I had started getting subversive messages or death threats or ‘Everyone into the streets,'” he laughed, “I would have said, ‘OK,’ there’s something fishy about this. But nothing like that happened.”

USAid says the program ended when the money ran out. The Cuban government declined to comment.

The former web domain is now a placeholder, for sale for $299.

The registration for MovilChat, the Cayman Islands front company, was set to expire on March 31.

In Cuba, nothing has come close to replacing it. Internet service still is restricted.

“The moment when ZunZuneo disappeared was like a vacuum,” Guerra said. “People texted my phone, ‘What is happening with ZunZuneo?’

“In the end, we never learned what happened,” he said. “We never learned where it came from.”

…………………………….

Added: From Slate article: “America’s [Obama administration] bizarre and ill-advised plan to build a fake twitter to topple Castro:”

5/3/2014, “Only built 4 Cuban tweets,” Slate.com, Joshua Keating

“USAID evidently thought it a good idea to help facilitate the creation of a barebones “Cuban Twitter,” which ran on cellphone text messaging to avoid Internet censors. It was thought that if the program caught on, it could help activists form “smart mobs” to protest the Cuban government…. 
 
This lack of transparency is what separates the project from projects like Voice of America, or Radio Martí, which everyone is aware are U.S. government stations, or other U.S.-supported efforts to help activists circumvent Internet censors.

There’s also the fact that the ZunZuneo team was apparently using the service to gather data on Cubans without their knowledge. For instance, when the Colombian rock star Juanes played a concert in Havana in 2009, the service sent out blasts asking respondents whether they thought “two popular local music acts out of favor with the government” should be onstage. One hundred thousand people responded—unaware that they were essentially participating in a U.S. government poll.

ZunZuneo fizzled out in 2012 when the project ran out of money—to the bafflement of many of its Cuban users. This Facebook page seems to be the only remnant of it left online. 

Given that U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba is where logic goes to die, the story shouldn’t be all that surprising. (For the last six years [2008-2014], the U.S. government has spent more than $24 million flying a plane around Cuba broadcasting propaganda that no one is able to hear.) But this one’s still a doozy.

Without ever really accomplishing anything of note, ZunZuneo manages to give rhetorical ammunition to leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who see U.S. social networks as agents of the U.S. government (Twitter’s Jack Dorsey was apparently approached about funding the project but did not comment in the AP’s article), and those like Vladimir Putin who say USAID aims to destabilize the countries where it works, and could make the Cuban government reconsider its decision to allow more cellphone and Internet access. (Although maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing in the long run for the Cuban opposition?)
.........

I also imagine the Chinese companies behind programs like WeChat can’t wait for the next time U.S. regulators raise concerns about their services being infiltrated by Chinese intelligence.”




................

Communist China officials overwhelm Dupont plant in Shanghai, seize computers, intimidate employees, follow some to bathroom. ChiComs stymy US chumps with “arbitrators” who steal more info. ChiComs say unfair to blame them. US profiteers tell US officials, don’t be too hard on China, they can punish you. Pathetic US political class for decades has made only timid efforts to address China brutality-Wall St. Journal

Added: 11/14/2014, ““If you are a major law firm and you’re working on a trade case with China, they’ll strip your computers,” said Virginia Republican [Rep. Frank Wolf, chair of House Commerce-Justice-Science Subcommittee], who is retiring this year after serving in the House since 1980….“Washington is not doing nearly enough to stop Chinese hackers, who reportedly broke into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) computer system in September [2014], from stealing critical information from U.S. government agencies and American businesses, says Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). “They have a more sophisticated spying apparatus than the KGB had,” Wolf told CNSNews.com. “We’re losing jobs, technology, everything is leaving. It’s like they’re coming in and literally taking whatever they want to take. And so sometimes you find out about it and sometimes you don’t.””…11/14/2014, “Rep. Wolf: Chinese Hackers ‘Literally Taking Whatever They Want’,” CNS News, Barbara Hollingsworth
……………..
9/26/18, “How China Systematically Pries Technology From U.S. Companies," Wall St. Journal, Lingling Wei in Beijing, Bob Davis in Washington (9/27 print ed.)

“Beijing leans on an array of levers to extract intellectual property—sometimes coercively.”

“DuPont Co. suspected its onetime partner in China was getting hold of its prized chemical technology, and spent more than a year fighting in arbitration trying to make it stop.

Then, 20 investigators from China’s antitrust authority showed up.

For four days this past December, they fanned out through DuPont’s Shanghai offices, demanding passwords to the company’s world-wide research network, say people briefed on the raid. Investigators printed documents, seized computers and intimidated employees, accompanying some to the bathroom.

Beijing leans on an array of levers to pry technology from American companies—sometimes coercively so, say businesses and the U.S. government.

Interviews with dozens of corporate and government officials on both sides of the Pacific, and a review of regulatory and other documents, reveal how systemic and methodical Beijing’s extraction of technology has become—and how unfair Chinese officials consider the complaints.

China’s tactics, these interviews and documents show, include pressuring U.S. partners in joint ventures to relinquish technology, using local courts to invalidate American firms’ patents and licensing arrangements, dispatching antitrust and other investigators, and filling regulatory panels with experts who may pass trade secrets to Chinese competitors.

In DuPont’s case, the dispute concerned a process to produce supple textile fibers from corn, a $400 million business for the company in 2017. The antitrust investigators, say the people briefed on the raid, told DuPont to drop the case against its former Chinese partner.

U.S. companies have long complained that Beijing pressures them to hand over intellectual property. More recently, their concerns have escalated as China turns into an advanced rival in industries ranging from chemicals to computer chips to electric vehicles.

Coerced technology transfer is now a central part of the spiraling U.S.-China trade fight, a standoff that appears to be only more entrenched. The White House estimates China inflicts $50 billion yearly in damages on U.S. companies. That transfer, U.S. executives regularly complain, weakens American businesses’ competitiveness and undermines the incentive to innovate.

Chinese authorities referred questions to a paper issued on Monday by the State Council, China’s cabinet, that says: “American companies in China have received huge returns through technology transfer and licensing, and are the biggest beneficiaries of technical cooperation” and that U.S. companies enter partnerships voluntarily.

“China’s offer to the world has been straightforward,” says a policy maker in Beijing. “Foreign companies are allowed to access China’s markets but they would need to contribute something in return: their technology.”

U.S. companies have gone into China with eyes wide open, for the most part, and many are wary of going public with complaints. American companies initially brought the idea of joint ventures to China as a way to get access to a market of 1.4 billion people and tap a low-cost workforce. The bargain included helping Chinese firms become more technologically advanced.

At a January U.S. Chamber of Commerce dinner in Washington, executives pressed U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad not to hit Beijing too hard on technology issues,according to dinner attendees. China has many ways to get even, warned Christopher Padilla, a vice president of International Business Machines Corp. , which licenses technology to Chinese firms.

“If someone gets knifed in a dark alley, you don’t know who did it until the next morning,” Mr. Padilla said at the dinner. “But there has been a murder.”

DuPont briefed U.S. officials on its problems but didn’t want its case raised in trade talks, say some of the people familiar with the case. Its former Chinese partner, Zhangjiagang Glory Chemical Industry Co., continues to sell chemicals used to make fibers that DuPont believes are knockoffs of its technology. DuPont and Glory declined to make executives available for comment.

China’s antitrust regulator said “the investigation is still ongoing,” declining to elaborate.

‘Notable pressure’

About one in five members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai say they have been pressured to transfer technology, according to a survey conducted in the spring. Of those companies, 44% in aerospace and 41% in chemicals report “notable pressure.” China considers both industries strategically important.

Trading market access for technology dates to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s effort to launch the pro-market policies that propelled China’s rise. General Motors Co. executives on an exploratory 1978 visit proposed a joint venture with a local company to boost a then-antiquated Chinese industry, say Chinese government advisers, historians and auto-industry executives.

The idea fit with Deng’s desire to obtain Western technology but limit Western influence. China “needs to give up portions of the domestic market in exchange for advanced technologies we need,” he pronounced in 1984. The policy was a success, according to a March 2018 paper by economists at the universities of Colorado, Hong Kong and Nottingham, who found that foreign technology “diffuses beyond the confines of the joint venture” and boosts competitors’ technology.

Foreigners bring cash, technology, management know-how and other intellectual property while the Chinese partner usually contributes some land-use rights, financing, political connections and market know-how. As the practice increased, one U.S. administration after another, with only modest success, pressed Beijing to ease requirements that U.S. companies fork over technology. The Trump administration says it wants to “change the paradigm” by hitting Beijing with tariffs.

China mandates that foreign companies wanting to open or expand in 35 sectors do it through joint ventures, though it announced a plan in April to phase out rules requiring foreign auto makers to share factory ownership and profits with Chinese companies by 2022.

The arrangement has worked for some. When China set out to build its first large commercial passenger jet in 2008, state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China made clear it would buy components only from joint ventures whose foreign partners would share technology. General Electric Co. agreed.

GE’s venture with state-owned Aviation Industry Corp. of China now is a main supplier of avionics for the domestic C919 aircraft. The joint venture helped GE avoid writing down a struggling avionics unit, according to former and current GE employees.

GE says “there was never a write down at our avionics business, nor was there risk of one.” It says, referring to intellectual property, that GE is “highly sensitive to the protection of our IP whether in our wholly-owned operations or in our” joint ventures.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., a Silicon Valley chip company, entered a joint venture in 2016 with Chinese private and state-owned entities, including the government’s Chinese Academy of Sciences. AMD licenses microprocessor technology to the venture and is developing new computer chips with it.

AMD has received about $140 million in licensing through 2017, enough to help boost it into the black last year for the first time since 2011. “We created a joint venture that was very much a win-win,” AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su said at a 2016 conference. An AMD spokesman says the joint venture is “part of our strategy to create a complementary product offering.”

Chinese leaders see innovative technologies as forces to propel its industries up the value chain into more sophisticated sectors and the country into rich-nation ranks. To ensure foreigners bring their best, phalanxes of regulatory panels scrutinize foreign investments to make sure they meet government goals.

Huntsman Corp. has singled out these review panels as a conduit for siphoning trade secrets. The Woodlands, Texas, chemicals maker is thriving in China, which accounted for about 14% of its 2017 revenues.

Still, “our competition isn’t going to be standing on the sidelines cheering a song,” CEO Peter Huntsman told analysts in June. They could be “trying to either steal the technology or develop the technology themselves.” Mr. Huntsman declined to be interviewed.

Regulatory panels, packed with industry experts, must approve many chemicals before they can be produced in China and require detailed information on formulas and production processes, say U.S. trade groups and chemical firms. “Enough information to duplicate the product,” is how the American Chemical Council trade group put it in a filing to the U.S. government.

For Huntsman, these panels have drilled down on specialized knowledge, such as how it makes plastics with high transparency and elasticity—the kind of material often used for making sports shoes—people close to Huntsman say. Soon after those experts conducted their evaluations, local competitors used the same kind of technology in their own products, they say.

Huntsman is battling over a crown jewel of its business, a black dye used in textiles that is less polluting to make. It filed a lawsuit in Shanghai against a Chinese company for infringing a patent on the dye in 2007. Huntsman then found a court-appointed review panel stacked against it, it said in a 2011 complaint it filed with the U.S. Commerce Department.

The three-panel members included an engineer from the company Huntsman was suing, another from a local dye-research group and a third who once worked at a local dye firm, according to the complaint and people with knowledge of the matter. The experts’ work “effectively turned them into allies and ‘spokespersons’ ” for the Chinese competitor, the complaint said.

Litigation of the patent-infringement case has dragged on. 

Huntsman has asked the Trump administration to consider blocking Chinese firms if they set up operations in the U.S. using disputed Huntsman technology.

For foreign auto makers, the review panels have become a battleground over electric-vehicle technology. New vehicles must get government approval before mass production, undergoing a mandatory technology audit that usually lasts several days, foreign makers say.

An audit this year convinced an employee at one foreign auto maker there was “clear evidence of collusion” between the audit team and Chinese auto makers. When the audit began, the person says, inspectors asked for only the blueprints of the electric-vehicle components the foreign company was striving to protect from its Chinese joint-venture partner.

“Somehow they knew exactly the areas to look at,” the person says. “There wasn’t a single question about any of the other very complex systems on the vehicle.”

The DuPont raid

DuPont also shared information with its Chinese partner, Zhangjiagang Glory, when it licensed the Chinese firm in 2006 to produce and distribute Sorona, the textile polymers made from corn. Within DuPont, the Glory deal was called a “tolling” partnership—a relationship that serves as a kind of toll to enter the market. DuPont trained Glory to set up a factory to produce Sorona polymers and to spin them into fibers.

Around 2013, say the people familiar with the case, DuPont didn’t renew Glory’s license amid suspicions the Chinese firm was ripping off its intellectual property to sell products similar to Sorona, which has grown to a $70 million business in China. DuPont filed two arbitration cases in China, alleging patent infringement, with hearings stretching through 2017.

Around that time, officials with the National Development and Reform Commission’s antitrust division in Beijing took an interest in the matter and started holding meetings with DuPont. The commission showed little interest in DuPont’s planned merger with Dow Chemical Co., completed late last year, even though it launched an antitrust investigation into the combined entity in December.

Rather, investigators focused on the DuPont-Glory standoff, say the people briefed on the case. During three days of meetings in December, DuPont became worried about a raid on its office. It planned an employee-training session on how to deal with one, but the investigators showed up first.

An investigator told DuPont officials they were looking at antitrust behavior, specifically their unwillingness to license technology to Chinese firms and their pursuit of the Glory case, say these people. DuPont officials, they say, now fear that even dropping the case won’t be sufficient to satisfy Beijing, which may want a hostage in the trade fight with Washington.

Trump administration officials see cases like this as evidence of China’s economic aggression. “The combination of naiveté and hubris on the part of U.S. companies seeking to enter the Chinese market, coupled with a sophisticated Chinese effort to extract technology has been a lethal combination,”says White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a China hawk.

During August trade talks, U.S. negotiators pressed Beijing about coerced technology transfer. They cited memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc., which filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in California in December alleging technology theft by Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. Jinhua sued Micron in January in a court in Fujian province—whose government partly controls Jinhua—and won a temporary order blocking some Micron subsidiaries from selling products in China that each company claims patents to.

Jinhua declined to comment. In a July statement, it said Micron has “recklessly” infringed on its patents. Micron says it intends “to vigorously protect our intellectual property and business interests through all available means.”

Chinese negotiator Commerce Vice Minister Wang Shouwen dismissed the concerns in August trade talks, say officials familiar with the talks. Micron and Jinhua “are like brothers,” Mr. Wang said, according to the officials, “and brothers fight.””
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"“Budget and Finso Services,” Subscriber 4 hours ago

Good article! It’ll be interesting to see how much multinational and Chinese production is outsourced to surrounding countries and over how long a period, to avoid tariffs. Remember what outsourcing of jobs has done to the U.S. middle-class… That won’t rest easy in domestic China. Given the current strength and leverage of U.S. economic clout, and the vulnerability of the Chinese economy, the destabilization of China’s middle-class may be precipitous – taking only one or two-decades compared to the multi-decade fall of the U.S. middle class.

We’re already seeing multinational supply chains being redistributed to avoid tariffs. The redistribution of investment and employment fortifies U.S. supply chains while simultaneously increasing the resiliency of China’s neighbors – many of which do not enjoy Chinese hard diplomacy. Hopefully, it has the effect of curbing Chinese nationalistic influence in that region of the world. This is a national security issue. I prefer the economic war.”

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Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side-Angelo Codevilla, 10/20/2011, The Lost Decade

10/20/2011, “The Lost Decade,“ [2001-2011] Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Institute

Subhead, “Public Safety:” 

“Again and again, the American people are forced to confront the fact that its ruling class is not on its side.“ (parag. 3)

“When…the losers are a whole ruling class, and when that class is pervasive enough to have banished to society’s margins any people and ideas that diverge from it, its discredit really does put society in a revolutionary situation.” (5th parag. from top)




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US War Industry ready to break out with emergence of possible Neocon dream candidate for US pres. in 2020, Eric Swalwell. Though a Democrat, both parties and Wall St. want US priority to be US taxpayer funded bombing and mass murder. Swalwell is backed by military industries, related service firms, Wall St, and of course the media-Strategic Culture, Eric Zuesse, 8/14/18

“Anything will be done to sell more weapons. Apparently, that’s the bottom line.”

8/14/18, “Swalwell a Major Contender for US Presidency in 2020,“ Strategic Culture, Eric Zuesse

“One of the most gifted politicians in the Democratic Party-and fastest-rising is the 37-year-old Eric Swalwell, whose first elective office was as a member of the Dublin, California, City Council in 2010, and who stepped up from there to his current seat in the US Congress, in 2013. His main financial backers are the military industries, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Wall Street — and the nonprofits and service-firms that represent them.

On Sunday, August 12th, Political Wire, which is the main news-aggregator for Democratic Party activists, headlined “Swalwell Travels to Iowa”and reported that,

“Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) — who was born in Iowa — told the San Jose Mercury News that his visit to Iowa “was focused on helping Democrats retake the House in 2018, including by winning competitive races,” but he also said he isn’t ruling out a presidential run in 2020.

Said Swalwell: “Right now my focus is to win at home, earn my way back to Washington to represent my constituents, help other candidates win so we can change the country, and then I’ll make decisions after November about my future.””

Swalwell is movie-star handsome; furthermore, his five-year record in Congress has shown him to be an extraordinarily resourceful career-builder and self-promoter, whose special leadership in the Party has been in their effort to impeach the Republican Party President Donald Trump and (though unmentioned) to replace Trump by the Republican Party Vice President Mike Pence, who is even more conservative than is Trump.

Typical in this effort to place Pence into the White House, is an MSNBC youtube titled “Rep. Eric Swalwell: President Donald Trump Is ‘Perilously Close’ To Obstruction Charge | MSNBC”, in which the issue of whom the President would be if Trump gets impeached is very skillfully ignored entirely, both by the interviewer and by the interviewee. Billionaires control both Parties; and the ones who control the Democratic Party (and MSNBC) are apparently convinced (perhaps by private polling) that the Democratic nominee in 2020 will have a much better chance of winning the White House if Pence is the President, than if Trump is. For whatever reason, almost all of the discussions about impeaching Trump, on Democratic Party sites, avoid even mentioning Pence.

But the same is true also on Republican Party sites. Swalwell is being heavily pumped by virtually all media that cover national politics. For example, on 21 May 2018, Fox News posted to YouTube “Calif. lawmaker makes his case for Russian collusion”, where Tucker Carlson debated Swalwell for 9 minutes, and though the actual subject was whether Trump should be impeached, none of the consequences of impeaching him (such as Pence replacing Trump) were even so much as mentioned. The billionaires in both Parties are apparently very taken with Swalwell, not only because he’s phenomenally gifted (as is clear from his ability to hold his own even against the formidable Carlson in that tough debate), but because if any Democrat replaces Trump in 2020, Swalwell would seem to be their dream for achieving that — and he’d probably be preferred by more of them in the general election than Trump would be.

Of course, both Parties claim to represent the public and not the billionaires; and, in this regard, while the standard Republican Party tactic to appeal to the ‘populist’ vote is to promise to “reduce waste, fraud, and abuse,” by eliminating or weakening the regulatory agencies (which the billionaires are determined to shrink or else eliminate if they can’t outright control them), the standard Democratic Party tactic to appeal to the ‘populists’ is to try to build a coalition of feminists, LGBT, Blacks, Hispanics, and other groups whom Republicans treat as being inferior to themselves.

Consequently, in order to win the White House as a Democrat, Swalwell has joined the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the Congressional LGBT Caucus, neither of which minority-groups includes himself. Unknown, as of yet, is whether he has applied for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, but according to Fact Check, as posted in 2008 and never since revised, the Congressional Black Caucus “has never had a white member in its 36-year history” (and, today, that would be never in its 46-year history), so that if he were to apply to join and then be turned down by them, and this were to become public, then the resultant bad publicity for that Caucus would likely reduce, instead of increase, Swalwell’s support by black voters.

Consequently, he probably won’t apply to join that Caucus. But perhaps he will seek to join the Bipartisan Congressional Women’s Caucus. They have never had any men, but, between 1981 and 1995, their official policy was to invite male Representatives to join; so, if he were to give it a try, then perhaps they would allow him in, and he then would be able to say that he’s the first-ever man to join the Women’s Caucus. (In 2015, a Men For Women Caucus was formed in the House, but it still hasn’t announced an agenda, and it has done nothing.) 

A prominent article on Swalwell’s House website is “Russia: Not Our Friend”, in which is provided a timeline, since 2007, of 13 events that he summarizes outside their context (so his brief accounts there constitute propaganda instead of history), events in which the Russian Government did or was accused of having done allegedly bad things. Typical is the most recent event listed, which is

“December 2016: Germany’s domestic security agency DfV announced that there was growing evidence that Russians were attempting to influence the upcoming September 2017 federal election.”

Linked-to in that, is a New York Times article, from 8 December 2016, headlined “After a Cyberattack, Germany Fears Election Disruption”, and it provided speculation but no evidence, at all. For example:

““Based on the prevailing Russian strategy of hybrid influence and destabilization, which we have observed over time and for which we have facts, the government, officials and some political parties have become sensitized to this form of conflict,” said Wilfried Jilge, an expert on Ukraine and Eastern Europe with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

“Such suspicions are the result of observation and experience over the past year and a half,” Mr. Jilge said.”

The Wikipedia article about the “German Council on Foreign Relations” states “The association was founded in 1955 in Bonn. The model for the foundation was in many respects the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the Chatham House in London.” Both of those groups, in turn, had been founded by, respectively, American and British billionaires and ‘nobles’ in order to advance the design by the 19th Century British aristocrat, Cecil Rhodes, for a reunification of the then-emergent US empire, back into the then-declining British empire, for a joint US-UK empire, including over Germany, and, ultimately, over Russia and the entire world.

Consequently, both the CFR and Chatham House are pro-NATO, and this means that they support conquest of Russia, and this urge for global conquest extends even up to their rejecting the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction or “M.A.D.” that the function of nuclear weapons is in order to prevent World War III, and their replacing that by the idea of “Nuclear Primacy” that the function of nuclear weapons is instead to win WW III. This ceaseless nuclear buildup, of course, means ever-increasing US military budgets, which also means soaring profits for firms such as Lockheed Martin and the rest of what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex,” such as had, in 2016, financed, above all other US politicians, Hillary Clinton, to whom they donated three times as much as they did to Donald Trump. Trump as President has been trying to satisfy those companies; and, consequently, his biggest achievement yet has been the all-time-record-shatteringly huge $400 billion sale of US weapons and training on how they’re used, to the Saudi armed forces. 

On 21 May 2017, I headlined “US $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements US-Jihadist Alliance” and reported that the day before, “US President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal.”  

Then, on 21 March 2018, CNBC bannered “Trump wants Saudi Arabia to buy more American-made weapons. Here are the ones the Saudis want”, and reported what Trump had just negotiated with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, which was a step-up in that record-shattering $350 billion arms-sale, to $400 billion. (Note: that’s “billion,” not “million.”) So: this is Trump’s American jobs-plan, and it probably tops what a President Swalwell would be able to achieve. Trump will push beyond any limit in order to overcome a possible competitive challenge.

If Rep. Swalwell does enter the 2020 Democratic Party primaries for the Presidency, the distinction between himself and Joe Biden would be his youth, handsomeness, and giftedness as a debater, versus Biden’s experience; but, otherwise, they both would be splitting the Democratic “centrist” vote in the primaries, since these two men would be competing for the same segments of the Party’s electorate — the segments who had voted in 2016 for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Whereas Trump might be able to defeat Biden, I think that his defeating Swalwell would be considerably less likely.  

So: Republican operatives would probably prefer for Democrats to nominate Biden, over Swalwell.

Swalwell is the biggest rising star in the Democratic Party since Obama in 2004. Four years later, Obama became elected President. Swalwell’s prominence now is comparable to Obama’s in 2004, but 2020 is only two years away, not four. I think that as a public speaker, Swalwell is less skilled than Obama, but that as a debater, he’s more skilled than Obama. Perhaps billionaires will buy-off Biden to not enter the primary contests, so as to help ease the way for Swalwell to become the Democratic nominee. Maybe Swalwell’s challenge would motivate Trump to try even harder to please them. From the billionaires’ standpoint, Swalwell v. Trump would be just as much a win-win situation as was Clinton v. Trump….

It’s all really just a feud amongst the aristocracy. It’s a bipartisan aristocracy, who fight ferociously between themselves. Everybody else is merely ‘collateral damage’; they don’t actually count.

The idea that Swalwell and his ilk peddle, that what has ended American democracy is ‘the Russians’ instead of America’s own aristocrats, isn’t merely false; it is proven false, as the former Democratic US President Jimmy Carter has acknowledged.

Anything will be done to sell more weapons.

Apparently, that's the bottom line.”




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