Thursday, April 3, 2014

U.S. secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest

Posted on Thursday, 04.03.14

U.S. secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest
BY DESMOND BUTLER, JACK GILLUM AND ALBERTO ARCE
ASSOCIATED PRESS

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.

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 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.

USAID spokesman Matt Herrick said the agency is proud of its Cuba
programs and noted that congressional investigators reviewed them last
year and found them to be consistent with U.S. 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 Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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, D.C., for-profit company that
has earned hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. 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 U.S. embassy. It was an
unusual arrangement that raised eyebrows in Washington, according to
U.S. 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
U.S. 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,'" 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
Gross. The U.S. contractor 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. U.S. 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 Sept. 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 U.S. 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 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.

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, 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 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."

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 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.

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, Clinton said the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 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.

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, 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."

"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."

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press researcher Monika
Mathur in Washington, and AP writers Andrea Rodriguez and Peter Orsi in
Havana. Arce reported from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Source: U.S. secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest - Top
Stories - MiamiHerald.com -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/03/4036402/us-secretly-created-cuban-twitter.html

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