US contractors profiled 'Cuban Twitter' responses

Posted on Wednesday, 04.30.14

US contractors profiled 'Cuban Twitter' responses
BY ALBERTO ARCE AND DESMOND BUTLER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica -- Paula Cambronero was studying public relations
at a Costa Rican college when she landed her first real job working for
a U.S. government contractor. But it wasn't to write press releases.

As part of a program shrouded in secrecy to build a "Cuban Twitter" on
the Communist-governed island, Cambronero profiled Cuban cellphone
users, categorizing them as "pro-revolution," "apolitical" or
"anti-revolutionary."

The social media network, paid for by the U.S. Agency for International
Development, sought to undermine the Cuban government through cellphone
text messaging to get around the island's Internet restrictions, The
Associated Press detailed in an investigation published in early April.

The plan for the bare-bones service, known as ZunZuneo, was to build a
subscriber base slowly through innocuous news messages, then when it
reached a critical mass of users, introduce political content aimed at
inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" to "renegotiate the balance of
power between the state and society," according to documents obtained by
the AP.

Following the AP's report, USAID chief Rajiv Shah told a U.S. Senate
panel that the program was not intended to influence Cuban politics. But
that doesn't square with Cambronero's work, first as an intern then as a
contracted employee, as detailed in the documents.

Cambronero's job was to test the political waters before the program was
launched. The contractor asked her to sign a security protocol that
required encrypted communications with other staff and emails sent from
a domain name "not publicly linked" to the contractor. It cautioned that
she would handle a "considerable amount of sensitive information that
must be safeguarded to protect critical operations of the Project."

USAID and its contractors went to great lengths to hide the U.S.
government's role in ZunZuneo, including establishing a front company in
the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail.

Cambronero, who studied at the University of Costa Rica, said
enthusiastically in a report on her work that it was "my first job
experience with an established schedule."

Nevertheless, she had considerable responsibility, building out a
database about Cuban mobile phone users, including gender, age,
"receptiveness" and "political tendencies" that USAID believed could
help bolster its Cuba programs. The Cubans responding to the text
messages were not aware the U.S. government was gathering data on them.

Cambronero did not respond to requests for comment. The State Department
had no comment Wednesday.

The political content of the social networking program is sensitive
because the Obama administration has denied it involved covert action.
The U.S. National Security Act defines "covert" as government activities
aimed at influencing political conditions abroad "where it is intended
that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or
acknowledged publicly." The law requires the president to approve covert
activities.

Costa Rica's government has asked Washington to explain why it ran such
a program from Costa Rican territory. Carlos Roverssi, the minister of
communications, said Wednesday that it will be up to the country's
recently elected government to deal with the matter once the U.S. responds.

"It seems to me that the issue is now public and the next government
should follow up on the issue, without a doubt," he said.

The State Department has said it would be "troubling" if political
messages were sent under the program, and ordered a review.

On Tuesday, USAID spokesman Matthew Herrick told the AP that the agency
had completed its review and forwarded to congressional oversight
committees a catalog of the messages sent to Cubans.

He said that the 249 messages related to technology, sports, world news
and trivia and that they "were consistent with the objective of creating
a platform for Cubans to speak freely among themselves."

Contractors hired a Cuban-born satirist to craft overtly political
messages that took aim at Cuba's leaders and some of them were sent to
Cuban mobile subscribers. Responses to those texts were reviewed by
Cambronero.

Herrick said those messages were sent out "under a grant that pre-dated
the ZunZuneo project."

However, multiple documents reviewed by the AP show USAID characterized
the grant that funded the political messages as the first stage of the
same project, describing it as the "test phase" of the network that
became ZunZuneo.

Under the program, contractors sent the texts from Spanish telephone
numbers to thousands of Cuban cellphones as part of a test to see if a
text-message based social network was viable. Some of the messages
included questions and Cubans were asked to respond.

Cambronero collected a sample of more than 700 responses and analyzed
them according to two variables. The first was the level of interest in
the messages received, and the second was the political nature of the
response.

She wrote in her report that 68 percent of responses showed mild
interest in the texts. But what many of the respondents most wanted to
know was the question that those behind the project were keeping secret:
Who was sending the messages? 210 responses criticized the sender's
anonymity, she noted.

"Explain your point better because I don't understand and remember that
if you haven't done anything you shouldn't fear anything, at least tell
me your name if you're not a coward," said one respondent.

One asked text senders not to "play around with the feelings of the
Cuban people."

Many users realized the messages were from Spain and they replied using
the term "Gallego" — which means someone from Spain's Galicia region but
is used in Cuban slang for a stupid person.

Other respondents asked for help in obtaining birth certificates of
Spanish ancestors, one of the basic requirements for obtaining Spanish
passports needed to leave the island.

Cambronero analyzed 59 responses for political content. She found that
only 10 had a political character, of which two were
counter-revolutionary. She also identified the respondents — by cell
number, name and location.

She recommended that "messages with a humorous connotation should not
contain a strong political tendency, so as not to create animosity in
the recipients."

Julia Sweig, director of Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations, said profiling the Cuban twitter users was "highly
inappropriate."

"Imagine for a moment how the American people would feel if the shoe was
on the other foot and a foreign government was gathering data on them
surreptitiously through a social network it had set up."

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Associated Press writer Jack Gillum in Washington contributed to this
report.

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Desmond Butler on Twitter: http://twitter.com/desmondbutler

Alberto Arce on Twitter: http://twitter.com/alberarce

Source: SAN JOSE, Costa Rica: US contractors profiled 'Cuban Twitter'
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