14 DAY TRIAL // It wasn’t just Cuba that the United States tried to influence to take action against the political leaders. In fact, the fact that one American organization put together ZunZuneo and hid the app’s origin is just a drop in the bucket for the US govt.
According to The Intercept, American and British intelligence agencies tried to take advantage of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, as well as other social media platforms, to misinform and conduct propaganda, as well as to stoke the fire for public protests.
Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the news on the Snowden leaks, says that the idea to exploit the Internet to disseminate points of view friendly to the interests of the Western world and spread false information about targets appears quite often among materials provided by Edward Snowden.
In a previous report on the same stack of files, it was revealed that the NSA was instructed to conduct real-time surveillance on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in order to collect the computer addresses of billions of users.
This seems to be a small-time idea compared to the topic of discussion during the 2010 SIGDEV gathering of the members of the Five Eyes, the surveillance alliance formed by the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
An NSA file from 2010’s SIGDEV meeting focuses on several topics, including propaganda, deception, mass messaging, publishing stories, alias development and psychology. Basically, the document outlines the goal of “using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world.”
Such operations are so important to the intelligence community that they comprise about 5 percent of Operations for the GCHQ.
A previous NBC report also indicated that the media could also be used for the agency’s purpose. This was done by picking out journalists that could be used to spread information. In fact, GCHQ operatives would snoop on non-British journalists to get information that could be used to manipulate them to feed the information they wanted.
ZunZuneo was a messaging tool created specifically for Cuba by an American state organization, which was supposed to be similar to Twitter but work offline. The app was built and shared without ever mentioning that it was created in the United States.
Its purpose was to encourage political change in Cuba after establishing a loyal user base by proposing regular topics, such as football and the weather.