Tweet tweet… the birdie just got let out of the cage

Last week  the U.S. was busted yet again for a naughty coverta operation. This time it wasn’t Eric Snowden but the Associated Press who did the busting.

And the bustee was  ZunZuneo, a Cuban Twitter like service designed to promote free information sharing (and, oh, secretly incite a little political unrest along the way). 

ZunZuneo was backed by USAID, an American government aid organization. The team from USAID was using allegedly using ZunZuneo to collect information about suspected dissenters in order to “target outreach.” 

The service was a huge success, growing to about 40,000 subscribers, until the money dwindled off. USAID realized they were paying huge text messaging fees to the Cuban telecommunications monopoly and decided to call it quits to avoid a scandal. Looks like they got one anyways!

An article from the New Yorker explains another part of the problem here:

The case presents another troubling issue: ZunZuneo was being run through a private operator, a firm called Mobile Accord, that had won a financial contract from the U.S. government. This is consistent with a growing pattern in recent years, in which implementation of the most sensitive aspects of American security policy is increasingly handed over to contractors who are working for money, not necessarily for philosophical or even patriotic reasons.

The details of the story show that the project got slightly out of hand for USAID, growing more than expected thanks to Mobile Accord.

In the end, no one seems to be apologizing. The White House deemed that the operation was not “covert”  and was rather a “development assistance program.”

Whatever it was, it was pretty shady.

Is providing Twitter to Cubans is considered a form of “aid,” or a form of spying?