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Cuba: US Using New Weapon Against Us -- Spam
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about accusations from Cuban officials about a spamming campaign against the country by the U.S.. "Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam. 'It's overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,' said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA. At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba's creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages. The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature. Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over about five hours."
300,000 in five hours? God forbid!
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This is the level of brain-dead scheme that the CIA has pulled many times in the past, but it's just as likely that they're just getting overwhelmed by one incompetent spammer with a fat pipe...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They are hardly a dangerous player in Cold War intrigue anymore; but I wouldn't necessarily underestimate the supply of nostalgic B-list and below feds just itching to go fight the last war, now set to 'casual' difficulty level.
Unless they truly fuck something up, people just keep accruing seniority until they die or finally become too senile to disguise their senility. We still have some years left before we've aged out all the cold warriors.
We had all kinds of crazy ideas for killing Castro. 10 Ways the CIA tried to kill Castro
Filtered... nice.
North Korea, Iran, Syria ... is that you guys?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Another, perhaps less amusing thing is that the US actually do care; at least as long as there is a noisy group of displaced, Cuban voters to please.
The idiotic thing is that you think "the US" is a monolith, instead of a bunch of agencies made up by people, with plenty of incentive to use tax payer money for useless or even counterproductive things, like attacking Iraq in response to 9/11, or killing kids with drones. If anything, "The US" isn't in the business of dealing with threats, it's in the business of creating them while talking about mushroom clouds and fucking its own population as it jumps on chairs in fear of imaginary mice; and the population responds with hollow chauvinistic sound bites aimed about other populations to make itself feel better about it. You're pinned to the floor, get fleeced for everything of value you got, and scream "ahhh! sweet victory!" because it's even worse elsewhere. Fucking pathetic.
>feds just itching to go fight the last war
I don't think the feds want to go to war. Cuba is communist and parts of it work. (like health care for the amount they spend). If they lifted the embargo and stop messing with them they could become a very successful communist country.
The success would be more due to them being a great tourist location and less because they are communist but the right wing is simply not going to tolerate a successful communist county if they can do anything about it.
AdFuel
.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay. Since the USSR collapsed its been pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things other than a source of refugees and comedy revolutionaries in green slacks with silly beards.
Well, the problem is that there are some people who do care and their influence is way out of whack with regards to their actual numbers. There are a small number of members of the US House and Senate who are offspring of Cuban refugees and they have a lot of influence. The younger generation of people who immigrated many years ago has little interest in continuing the embargo, but there are still enough of the old hardcore anti-Castro people in Florida that no president is willing to undo the embargo for fear of the next presidential election going against his party. Florida is a hotly contested state that gives a very thin majority to whoever wins it in the presidential elections. Florida has a lot of electoral votes. So if you piss off, say, 40 or 50 thousand voters who care a lot (maybe too much) about the Castro brothers and Cuba, you could lose the next presidential election. So the president never has the courage to drop the embargo as either he or his party's next candidate will face angry voters in the next presidential election and it could be enough to decide the race in favor of the other party. It's rather remarkable to see an entire country held hostage to the whims of a really small group of people over one issue, but that's exactly how it is here.
Finally somebody's getting at what's behind all the meddling in Cuba. Virulent anti-Castro Cuban ex-pats hold a lot of political sway, and giving them what they want doesn't annoy many other US citizens. So they get what they want because the cost to politicians is near zero. Never mind that Cuba isn't the falling domino threatening to take the rest of Latin America to communism that it was thought to be 50 years ago and really has little effect on anyone outside its borders. Sure, there are a few dinosaurs and misadventurers in the US government or three-letter-agencies, but they wouldn't get funding if it weren't for the ex-pats' influence. Shouldn't funds go instead to countering real threats like Bermuda, the Canaries, and Palmyra?
Still with that? Obviously big fishes are pocketing tons of taxpayers money with this scam.....and those guys will never cut the flow, on both sides of the story. Reality is, no govt really cares about the people.