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There has been increased interest in encryption from individual consumers, too, largely thanks to the NSA revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. Yahoo and Google began offering end-to-end encrypted e-mail services this year. Silent Circle, a startup catering to consumer and enterprise clients, has been developing end-to-end voice encryption for phones calls. Verizon's service, with a monthly price of $45 per device, isn't targeting individual buyers and won't be offered to average consumers in the near future.But Verizon's partner, Cellcrypt, looks upon selling to large organizations as the first step toward bringing down the price before eventually offering a consumer-level encryption service. "At the end of the day, we'd love to have this be a line item on your Verizon bill," says Polansky.

Many people in the security industry believe that a designed access point creates a vulnerability for criminals or spies to exploit. Last year reports surfaced that the FBI was pushing legislation that would require many forms of Internet communication to be wiretap-ready. A group of prominent security experts responded strongly: "Requiring software vendors to build intercept functionality into their products is unwise and will be ineffective, with the result being serious consequences (PDF) for the economic well-being and national security of the United States," they wrote in a report issued in May. 

n recent days, the United States circulated to its allies a confidential paper highlighting American objectives in the negotiations, "Right to Privacy in the Digital Age -- U.S. Redlines." It calls for changing the Brazilian and German text so "that references to privacy rights are referring explicitly to States' obligations under ICCPR and remove suggestion that such obligations apply extraterritorially." In other words: America wants to make sure it preserves the right to spy overseas. The U.S. paper also calls on governments to promote amendments that would weaken Brazil's and Germany's contention that some "highly intrusive" acts of online espionage may constitute a violation of freedom of expression. Instead, the United States wants to limit the focus to illegal surveillance -- which the American government claims it never, ever does. Collecting information on tens of millions of people around the world is perfectly acceptable, the Obama administration has repeatedly said. It's authorized by U.S. statute, overseen by Congress, and approved by American courts.

"Recall that the USG's [U.S. government's] collection activities that have been disclosed are lawful collections done in a manner protective of privacy rights," the paper states. "So a paragraph expressing concern about illegal surveillance is one with which we would agree." The privacy resolution, like most General Assembly decisions, is neither legally binding nor enforceable by any international court. But international lawyers say it is important because it creates the basis for an international consensus -- referred to as "soft law" -- that over time will make it harder and harder for the United States to argue that its mass collection of foreigners' data is lawful and in conformity with human rights norms. "They want to be able to say ‘we haven't broken the law, we're not breaking the law, and we won't break the law,'" said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel for Human Rights Watch, who has been tracking the negotiations. The United States, she added, wants to be able to maintain that "we have the freedom to scoop up anything we want through the massive surveillance of foreigners because we have no legal obligations."

The United States negotiators have been pressing their case behind the scenes, raising concerns that the assertion of extraterritorial human rights could constrain America's effort to go after international terrorists. But Washington has remained relatively muted about their concerns in the U.N. negotiating sessions. According to one diplomat, "the United States has been very much in the backseat," leaving it to its allies, Australia, Britain, and Canada, to take the lead. There is no extraterritorial obligation on states "to comply with human rights," explained one diplomat who supports the U.S. position. "The obligation is on states to uphold the human rights of citizens within their territory and areas of their jurisdictions."

The position, according to Jamil Dakwar, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Program, has little international backing. The International Court of Justice, the U.N. Human Rights Committee, and the European Court have all asserted that states do have an obligation to comply with human rights laws beyond their own borders, he noted. "Governments do have obligation beyond their territories," said Dakwar, particularly in situations, like the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where the United States exercises "effective control" over the lives of the detainees. Both PoKempner and Dakwar suggested that courts may also judge that the U.S. dominance of the Internet places special legal obligations on it to ensure the protection of users' human rights.

"It's clear that when the United States is conducting surveillance, these decisions and operations start in the United States, the servers are at NSA headquarters, and the capabilities are mainly in the United States," he said. "To argue that they have no human rights obligations overseas is dangerous because it sends a message that there is void in terms of human rights protection outside countries territory. It's going back to the idea that you can create a legal black hole where there is no applicable law." There were signs emerging on Wednesday that America may have been making ground in pressing the Brazilians and Germans to back on one of its toughest provisions. In an effort to address the concerns of the U.S. and its allies, Brazil and Germany agreed to soften the language suggesting that mass surveillance may constitute a violation of human rights. Instead, it simply deep "concern at the negative impact" that extraterritorial surveillance "may have on the exercise of and enjoyment of human rights." The U.S., however, has not yet indicated it would support the revised proposal.

The concession "is regrettable. But it’s not the end of the battle by any means," said Human Rights Watch’s PoKempner. She added that there will soon be another opportunity to corral America's spies: a U.N. discussion on possible human rights violations as a result of extraterritorial surveillance will soon be taken up by the U.N. High commissioner.

The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague, The word “cartel” has here assumed the stigma of a bogeyman which the politicians are constantly attacking. The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic and because the political organization of the world has under such influence been so backward, business people who have had to cope realistically with international problems have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.21

In the 1960s and especially the 1970s America began to import more and more oil from the Middle East. But the negative effect on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increasing arms and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Contracts with companies like Northrop and especially Lockheed (the builder of the CIA’s U-2) included kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, who were also important CIA agents. Lockheed alone later admitted to the Church Committee that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times what it had paid to the next most important connection, Kodama.31 These funds were then used by Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-Western influence. But Khashoggi, advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss, distributed cash, and sometimes provided women, not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world – including cash to congressmen and President Nixon in the United States.32 Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting, and nothing else to prevent their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.33

The most dramatic use of off-the-books drug profits to finance foreign armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led campaign in Laos. There the CIA supplied airstrips and planes to support a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong army. At one point Laotian CIA station chief Theodore Shackley even called in CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf of the larger Royal Laotian Army.30

At the time of the Marshall Plan slush fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps which resulted in drug money to support anti-communist armies in the Far East. In my book American War Machine I tell how the CIA, using former OSS operative Paul Helliwell, created two proprietary firms as infrastructure for a KMT army in Burma, an army which quickly became involved in managing and developing the opium traffic there. The two firms were SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane with KMT bankers in Taiwan – this allowed the CIA to deny responsibility for the flights when CAT planes, having delivered arms from Sea Supply to the opium-growing army, then returned to Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even after the CIA officially severed its connection to the KMT Army in 1953, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc. supplied arms for a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU, that also was financed, at least in part, by the drug traffic.28 Profits from Thailand filtered back, in part through the same Paul Helliwell, as donations to members from both parties in Congress. Thai dictator Phao Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then alleged to be the richest man in the world, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to [former OSS chief William] Donovan [who in 1953-55 was US Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.29

The power exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to his access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward Moss owned the elite Safari Club in Kenya.34 The exclusive club became the first venue for another and more important Safari Club: an alliance between Saudi and other intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.35

As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni, In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.36 Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington (decisions not only of Congress but also of President Carter).

Specifically Khashoggi’s activities involving corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up quickly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and a principal Safari Club member, was a part-owner.37 In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied shipping empire owned by the Pakistani Gokal brothers, supplied financing and infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the decade, support for the Afghan mujahedin. To quote from a British book excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report: “BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank’s role began to surface in the mid-1980′s when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia’s cabinet as saying ‘It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.’ The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%.”38

In 1981 Vice-president Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, working together, won congressional approval for massive new arms sales of AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion package, only ten percent covered the cost of the planes. Most of the rest was an initial installment on what was ultimately a $200 billion program for military infrastructure through Saudi Arabia.41 It also supplied a slush fund for secret ops, one administered for over a decade in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he became the Saudi Ambassador (and a close friend of the Bush family, nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund was “the ultimate government-off-the-books.” Not long after the AWACS sale was approved, Prince Bandar thanked the Reagan administration for the vote by honoring a request by William Casey that he deposit $10 million in a Vatican bank to be used in a campaign against the Italian Communist Party. Implicit in the AWACS deal was a pledge by the Saudis to fund anticommunist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere that were supported by the Reagan Administration.42 The Vatican contribution, “for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party,” of course continued a CIA tradition dating back to 1948.

The activities of the Safari Club were exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the records of the US Embassy in Tehran. But BCCI support for covert CIA operations, including Iran-Contra, continued until BCCI’s criminality was exposed at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington resumed off-budget funding for CIA covert operations under cover of arms contracts to Saudi Arabia. But this was no longer achieved through kickbacks to CIA assets like Khashoggi, after Congress in 1977 made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreign officials. Instead arrangements were made for payments to be returned, through either informal agreements or secret codicils in the contracts, by the Saudi Arabian government itself. Two successive arms deals, the AWACS deal of 1981 and the al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably escalated the amount of available slush funds.

It is reported in two books that the BCCI money flow through the Bank of Oman was handled in part by the international financier Bruce Rappaport, who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a former CIA officer on his staff.39 Rappaport’s partner in his Inter Maritime Bank, which interlocked with BCCI, was E.P. Barry, who earlier had been a partner in the Florida money-laundering banks of Paul Helliwell.40

After a second proposed major U.S. arms sale met enhanced opposition in Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. Once again overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”43 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade.44 The money went through a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs Bank, Washington; according to Trento, the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in his words, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States.”45 More accurately, the financing was not for the United States, but for the American deep state.

This leads me to the most original and important thing I have to say. I believe that these secret funds from BCCI and Saudi arms deals – first Khashoggi’s from Lockheed and then Prince Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-Yamamah deals – are the common denominator in all of the major structural deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted America since the supranational Safari Club was created in l976. I am referring specifically to 1) the covert US intervention in Afghanistan (which started about 1978 as a Safari Club intervention, more than a year before the Russian invasion), 2) the 1980 October Surprise, which together with an increase in Saudi oil prices helped assure Reagan’s election and thus give us the Reagan Revolution, 3) Iran-Contra in 1984-86, 4) and – last but by no means least – 9/11. That is why I believe it is important to analyze these events at the level of the supranational deep state. Let me just cite a few details.

1) the 1980 October Surprise. According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches, the principal founder of the Safari Club, arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments, in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran until Reagan was in power. Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.46 In addition, John Cooley considers de Marenches to be “the Safari Club player who probably did most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure.”47 2) the Iran-Contra scandal (including the funding of the Contras, the illegal Iran arms sales, and support for the Afghan mujahideen There were two stages to Iran-Contra. For twelve months in 1984-85, after meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal, supported the Nicaraguan Contras via Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank account in Miami. But in April 1985, after the second proposed arms sale fell through, McFarlane, fearing AIPAC opposition, terminated this direct Saudi role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme in which Iranian arms sales involving Israel would fund the contras. The first stage of Iran-Contra was handled by Prince Bandar through a BCCI account in Miami; the second channel was handled by Khashoggi through a different BCCI account in Montecarlo. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on BCCI also transmitted allegations from a Palestinian-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from BCCI for arms sales to Iran came ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”48

3) 9/11 When the two previously noted alleged hijackers or designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed them and opened bank accounts for them. Soon afterwards Bayoumi’s wife began receiving monthly payments from a Riggs bank account held by Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal.49 In addition, Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. In all, “between 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa … – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi.”50 Although these sums in themselves are not large, they may have been part of a more general pattern. Author Paul Sperry claims there was possible Saudi government contact with at least four other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia and Florida. For example, “9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited s home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.”51

But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s payments were said to have included “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.52 In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Riggs Bank, which was by then under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.”53 Meanwhile President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C.”54 For this a Riggs account executive, Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang enjoyed State Department approval for a contract with the private U.S. military firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending offshore oil platforms owned by ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess.55 Behind the CIA relationship with the Riggs Bank was the role played by the bank’s overseas clients in protecting U.S. investments, and particularly (in the case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil companies.

The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.56 A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.57 It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.58

This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.59 The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.60 The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it. It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.

But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.61 In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state. Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.

Read Next: Robert Scheer on the 1953 CIA-supported coup in Iran.

The last four clandestine meetings, held since Iran's reform-minded President Hassan Rouhani was inaugurated in August, produced much of the agreement later formally hammered out in negotiations in Geneva among the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and Iran, said three senior administration officials. All spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss by name the highly sensitive diplomatic effort. The AP was tipped to the first U.S.-Iranian meeting in March shortly after it occurred, but the White House and State Department disputed elements of the account and the AP could not confirm the meeting. The AP learned of further indications of secret diplomacy in the fall and pressed the White House and other officials further. As the Geneva talks appeared to be reaching their conclusion, senior administration officials confirmed to the AP the details of the extensive outreach.

"Rather than fix the problem that SIGTARP warned Treasury about in its audit, Treasury allowed the problem to get worse. Rather than following SIGTARP’s recommendations, which were designed to make Treasury and states set goals and work hard to achieve those goals, Treasury is refusing to hold itself or the states accountable to any goal of the number of homeowners to be assisted in HHF, and the result has been that the program is reaching far fewer homeowners than the states expected," the agency said.As of June 30, 2013, the latest data available, it said, states had spent only 22 percent, or $1.7 billion, of the TARP funds and the program had helped only 27 percent of the homeowners that states had anticipated helping in 2011.

USAID's top official, Rajiv Shah, is scheduled to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations State Department and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, on the agency's budget. The subcommittee's chairman, Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, is the senator who called the project "dumb, dumb, dumb" during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC.The administration said early Thursday that it had disclosed the initiative to Congress — Carney said the program had been "debated in Congress" — but hours later the narrative had shifted to say that the administration had offered to discuss funding for it with the congressional committees that approve federal programs and budgets."We also offered to brief our appropriators and our authorizers," said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. She added that she was hearing on Capitol Hill that many people support these kinds of democracy promotion programs. And some lawmakers did speak up on that subject. But by late Thursday no members of Congress had acknowledged being aware of the Cuban Twitter program earlier than this week.

Harf described the program as "discreet" but said it was in no way classified or covert. Harf also said the project, dubbed ZunZuneo, did not rise to a level that required the secretary of state to be notified. Neither former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton nor John Kerry, the current occupant of the office, was aware of ZunZuneo, she said.In his prior position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry had asked congressional investigators to examine whether or not U.S. democracy promotion programs in Cuba were operated according to U.S. laws, among other issues. The resulting report, released by the Government Accountability Office in January 2013, does not examine whether or not the programs were covert. It does not say that any U.S. laws were broken.The GAO report does not specifically refer to ZunZuneo, but does note that USAID programs included "support for the development of independent social networking platforms."

"I know they said we were notified," Leahy told AP. "We were notified in the most oblique way, that nobody could understand it. I'm going to ask two basic questions: Why weren't we specifically told about this if you're asking us for money? And secondly, whose bright idea was this anyway?"The Republican chairman of a House oversight subcommittee said his panel will be looking into the project, too."That is not what USAID should be doing," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform National Security Subcommittee. "USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished."

At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the USAID's longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and the details could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.Leahy and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said they were unaware of ZunZuneo.

USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project."There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement," according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc., one of the project's creators. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission."ZunZuneo was publicly launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use.The AP obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the ZunZuneo project's development. It independently verified the project's scope and details in the documents through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those involved.

The social media project began after Washington-based Creative Associates International obtained a half-million Cuban cellphone numbers. It was unclear to the AP how the numbers were obtained, although documents indicate they were done so illicitly from a key source inside the country's state-run provider. Project organizers used those numbers to start a subscriber base.ZunZuneo's organizers wanted the social network to grow slowly to avoid detection by the Cuban government. Eventually, documents and interviews reveal, they hoped the network would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice — that could trigger political demonstrations, or "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, Clinton said the U.S. helps people in "oppressive Internet environments get around filters." Noting Tunisia's role in the Arab Spring, she said people used technology to help "fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change."Suzanne Hall, then a State Department official working on Clinton's social media efforts, helped spearhead an attempt to get Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to take over the ZunZuneo project, documents indicate. Dorsey declined to comment.

The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, public government data show, but those documents don't reveal where the funds were actually spent.ZunZuneo's organizers worked hard to create a network that looked like a legitimate business, including the creation of a companion website — and marketing campaign — so users could subscribe and send their own text messages to groups of their choice."Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise," one written proposal obtained by the AP said. Behind the scenes, ZunZuneo's computers were also storing and analyzing subscribers' messages and other demographic information, including gender, age, "receptiveness" and "political tendencies." USAID believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programs and "maximize our possibilities to extend our reach."

Executives set up a corporation in Spain and an operating company in the Cayman Islands — a well-known British offshore tax haven — to pay the company's bills so the "money trail will not trace back to America," a strategy memo said. Disclosure of that connection would have been a catastrophic blow, they concluded, because it would undermine the service's credibility with subscribers and get it shut down by the Cuban government.Similarly, subscribers' messages were funneled through two other countries — and never through American-based computer servers.Denver-based Mobile Accord considered at least a dozen candidates to head the European front company. One candidate, Francoise de Valera, told the AP she was told nothing about Cuba or U.S. involvement.

James Eberhard, Mobile Accord's CEO and a key player in the project's development, declined to comment. Creative Associates referred questions to USAID.For more than two years, ZunZuneo grew, reaching at least 40,000 subscribers. But documents reveal the team found evidence Cuban officials tried to trace the text messages and break into the ZunZuneo system. USAID told the AP that ZunZuneo stopped in September 2012 when a government grant ended.

Both Litt and De spoke hours before the Senate intelligence committee was due to begin a second day of considering chairwoman Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to increase transparency around the NSA’s surveillance activities. A Tuesday afternoon markup session of the bill – whose text is not yet public – went uncompleted. Feinstein, previously an unequivocal supporter of the NSA, unexpectedly criticized the agency’s surveillance on foreign leaders, a relatively traditional surveillance function. Feinstein on Monday declared herself “totally opposed” to the collection and suggested her oversight committee was not “fully informed” of the practice. A similar rift has emerged between NSA and the White House over how much President Obama knew about the spying, which US officials have said does not currently take place and will not resume. Litt appeared to concede that Obama himself may not have known about spying on Merkel, but contended that the White House and Senate intelligence committee had all the information necessary to understand it was taking place.

“I completely disagree with the proposition that the fact that the president and the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee didn’t know every single one of these selectors the NSA was tasking means there is ineffective oversight,” Litt said. “What the president knew and what the Senate intelligence committee knows: they know what our intelligence priorities are. Those are set annually through the interagency process. That says, here’s the kind of information we need to collect. And that gets sent out to the intelligence community and then the intelligence community, through a process that works down through the ranks, figures out what’s the best way to select that. “It’s very easy in hindsight to say, well, this particular selector was sensitive and so the president should have been told that,” Litt continued. “That’s always true in hindsight. Virtually everything we do, if it comes out, is going to be embarrassing.”

In 2003, Bush invoked “sources and methods” when defending his decision to classify the pages, saying “Declassification of that part of a 900-page document would reveal sources and methods that would make it harder for us to win the war on terror. … It would help the enemy if they knew our sources and methods.” Among many who have read the 28 pages, Congressman Walter Jones denies that declassification would harm national security in any way, pointing to other motives for the secrecy. “There’s nothing in it about national security. It’s about the Bush administration and its relationship with the Saudis,” Jones told The New Yorker.