The idea of “democracy promotion” is noble, but Washington’s efforts in Cuba – emphasizing clandestine and covert operations to drive regime change – have wasted a couple hundred million dollars, cost the United States valuable prestige on the island, and hurt relations with Costa Rica and other countries.
The Associated Press revealed more details Monday morning about Costa Rican involvement in United States Agency for International Development’s covert anti-Cuba operations, including the use of HIV-prevention workshops as fronts for recruiting pro-democracy activists.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The past year's revelations about U.S. spying on Germany have been disastrous for many U.S. businesses. When documents provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden showed the agency was monitoring German citizens' communications, Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed building a Europe-only Internet, which would cut out U.S. Internet firms that cooperated with NSA spying.
This week tech companies, democracy advocates, and open-Internet activists joined forces for a Reset the Net campaign that emphasizes both personal privacy and open access to information on the Web. As part of the initiative, companies including Google, Mozilla, Yahoo, Twitter and Reddit are fundraising, educating and launching new security features and services.
The White House has proposed to halt the National Security Agency's controversial bulk telephone data collection of U.S. .citizens, a program which sparked a vast public outcry.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The United States National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording "100 percent" of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.
HAVANA, Cuba – Cuban President Raúl Castro Tuesday railed against U.S. spying as he opened a summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders, a group set up by Venezuela's late anti-Western leader Hugo Chávez to counter U.S. influence.
"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," said U.S. District Court judge Richard Leon.
