Tuesday, April 29, 2014

How Washington and its Allies Use Social Media to Topple Governments & Manipulate Public Opinion | SCG News

The U.S. government's latest attempt to topple Cuba using social media is just the tip of the iceberg, but what's really interesting is how connects to the Ukrainian crisis.

On April 2nd the Associated Press released an report exposing how the U.S. government recently attempted to topple the Cuban government yet again. This time the plot hinged on the creation of a communications network called "ZunZuneo" which was essentially a primitive version of Twitter. The plan, which was cooked up by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. State Department, was to build up a large following of users and then push them towards revolt. The network was built using shell companies and financed through a foreign bank to hide their connection to Washington. The Obama administration defended the program saying that it "had disclosed the initiative to Congress".

Of course we all know that attempting to topple a foreign government is perfectly fine as long as you let congress know a bit in advance.

As shocking and absurd as these revelations may be to the general public, the truth of the matter is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. government and its allies have been using the internet as a covert weapon for some time now. Much of the evidence of these activities got mainstream coverage, but the corporate media is very careful not to refer to that evidence in the context of current events.

So let's connect a few dots here.

In 2011 it came to light that the U.S. military had developed a 'sock puppet' software for creating and managing fake online identities. These sock puppet accounts were to be used to spread propaganda on social media sites, forums and blogs. The software which was described as an "online persona management service" allows one soldier to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world. When this program was exposed the U.S. government claimed that the program was never used on English speaking audiences. Considering that these are the same people who swore up and down that the NSA surveillance program never targeted U.S. citizens, we can take that with a grain of salt, but it's worth noting that they explicitly acknowledged in their statement that the program was intended for covert operations in foreign countries.

A leaked document recently made public by Glenn Greenwald showed that the UK's GCHQ has been running a similar program through a unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (or JTRIG). You can download the file that Greenwald leaked here..

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