Communications: U.S. Government Continues with Even More Acts of Aggression against Cuba

The Department of State and its agency of destabilization, USAID, estimate to spend some $30 million more for its interventionist operations meant to convert the Internet into an instrument of penetration and intelligence in Cuban national territory.

The website Cuba Money Project confirms this through American journalist and investigator Tracey Eaton by publishing a document dated Jan. 11 — recently identified to the American special services — that reveals how requests are made for “ideas” from NGOs and specialized businesses interested in developing projects related to the use of the Internet “in Cuba and other nations.” The document was published on the eve of the trial in Havana of American Alan Philip Gross, a contractor for USAID, later sentenced for his criminal activities. Feb. 7 was the deadline for the presentation of programs.

“The State Department has not named — and likely will not announce — the organizations that will carry out the projects,” writes Eaton, an ex-correspondent for Diario Tejano in Cuba.

Grants from $500,000 to $8 million are available for these projects, with a total that could reach $30 million, the study specifies. Furthermore, the money comes from the 2010 federal budget, not from this year’s.

The Department of State, with a precision that seems to refer directly to the case of Gross or to previous intelligence operations, explains that the chosen organizations must possess work experience in “acutely hostile Internet environments.”

The spearheading of these so-called “web-based circumvention-technology” operations is specifically intended to avoid and deceive the usual detection systems (“firewalls and filters”) used to detect the multiple forms of illicit use of the Internet, according to each country’s laws. The strategy includes a “training program” that involves the development of a “network of digital safety instructors” that carries out operations with “organizations [that] are under threat,” read: operations that operate in an illegal way.

The organizations and businesses invited to submit proposals should be able to “train,” said the request for bids, “activists, bloggers, citizen-journalists, and civil society organizations” and promote the use of new technologies of person-to-person communication and “social networks.” The program even foresees a fund for the defense of activists with legal problems in cases involving “hacking” and “cyber intrusion.”*

In addition to Cuba, the solicitation of proposals makes references to China, Burma, Iran, Russia and Venezuela, all countries that refuse to subject themselves to the imperial dominion of the U.S., always with the usual rhetoric of “helping digital activities,” the known strategy of recruitment of agents and informants developed for the intelligence apparatus of the U.S.

This document integrally corresponds to what was expressed recently in a magazine by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Tracey Eaton mentions in his revealing investigation.

*Editor’s Note: According to cubamoneyproject.org, funding would “cover costs associated with living expenses or legal fees, in addition to a rapid-response fund to provide short-term funding for civil society organizations that have been targeted by severe hacking or cyber intrusion incidents (such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks) to keep their online operations up and running.”