US secretly built 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest

The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Agency for International Development was behind the creation of a “Cuban Twitter,” a social network designed to undermine the communist government and push Cubans toward dissent.

The project – called ZunZuneo – drew tens of thousands of subscribers in the more than two years in operated. American contractors were able to gather personal data on users.

According to the report, “The AP obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the 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 in ZunZuneo.”

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The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show.

"In the latest in an ongoing investigation by KCRA into the state’s new unemployment department computer system, insiders tell KCRA’s Sharokina Shams that the system’s computer upgrade is a “system failure.”  The error reports they supplied from just one day’s work show that more than 1,700 problems exist with the system.  This is a steady increase from the initial reports of first a few hundred then close to 1500.  Multiple payments, missed payments, even losing records have occurred as a result and 80-100,000 people are still waiting for their benefit checks.  Meanwhile the state says the backlog has been addressed.  As a result of the computer problems, for 3 straight weeks, the national jobs numbers have been skewed due to California’s inaccurate data."

“Two top UC Irvine surgeons have spent a decade working with a California company to promote a $2 million surgical robot despite a lack of reliable scientific evidence showing that it is safe or gives patients better results.”

"Hundreds of thousands of Americans are receiving medical devices that were once considered nearly exclusive to the elderly. The shift is profoundly changing patient care and expanding the fortunes of the medical-technology industry while amplifying concerns over the safety and oversight of some products. Device companies are facing thousands of patient lawsuits challenging the safety of some devices, and federal regulators are under greater pressure to intensify their oversight. At the same time, device makers are spending millions to promote their products to doctors and patients while simultaneously pushing to simplify governmental reviews to quicken their products’ path to market."

"The state government started trying to replace the Division of Motor Vehicles’ antiquated computer system in 2006, with the new system ostensibly to be working in mid-2010."

“An investigation into the hidden cost of the smartphone revolution”