Can US Cyber Command manage that? Does anyone have a clue? pl
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Psiphon?
Psiphon is a VPN and works to the same effect as TOR. Both depend on open access to the internet to allow the user not to be tracked. Without that open access to the internet, neither Psiphon nor TOR work. The Cuban internet largely relies on satellite connections to the state-owned telco. Users primarily use cellular internet provided by that telco on their smartphones. Much like Russia, Cuba can disconnect their internet from the open internet negating the usefulness of TOR or Psiphon. The only possibility I see is to hijack the GSM cellular network with powerful land, sea or space-based transmitters. If this even is possible, the connection would be one way. Cuban smartphones won’t be able to transmit to our stations. It would basically be another channel of Radio y Televisión Martí. BTW, is Martí turning it up a notch?
I forgot, Cuba also has a fiber optic cable to Venezuela. That still doesn’t help us get control of the Cuban internet. It still goes through the Cuban government telco. Google also has some servers in Cuba to store content, but I imagine the government has full access to those servers.
TTG
How about we shut down all Cuban guv comms until they unblock the internet. Yanqui ransomware attack.
I’m sure we can shut down their internet and probably their GSM system. They have redundant intranet and internal commo systems which we can at least degrade. If they maintain an old strowger switch POTS, I doubt we can touch it. Given how they maintain pre-revolution cars, I bet their old POTS would be ready to go in short order.
Colonel,
I’m not sure how close US blimps could get to Cuba – but if 20 miles is the sovereignty zone then it strikes me as possible. Google says “the longest distance the GSM specification supports in practical use is 35 kilometres (22 mi)” so service to coastal cities seems possible.
James
We can do satellite if we want to substitute their internet.
That only works if we get satellite modems to the Cuban people. On the other hand, upping the signal and programming of Radio y Televisión Martí is doable. There are thousands of pirate TV dishes and receivers in Cuba.
TTG
That sounds promising.
We could defeat it easily. SAT phones. Unload thousands of SAT phones. Used these in Afghanistan. Can’t be blocked by any country. We are not going to do that but it could be done EASILY. They are blocking a pipeline. Get out of the pipeline. They control that dimension but there is another they do not.
Pretty much sums up my feelings about Cuba and their access to the internet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqVCJpRqWQ
The wider world now beckons. Hard to turn it off. But please dear God, don’t go the way of your other Caribbean brethren when you become finally “free”. (Drugs and crime)
I wonder why are we being redirected to Cuba´s lack of rights and internet when a dictatorship is being unleashed in France while Biden is trying to label as a threat to security and bann, announced by Jen Psaki, any alternative info on the pandemic, while in LA this is happening …
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1416494891203538944
I hope you post this…
Precisely!
The national security apparatus in the United States is that that much more powerful and devious than what the Church Committee disclosed in the mid-70s. Now with market consolidation and the merger of the oligopoly and the national security state many actions transcend both. Censorship of ideas and thoughts inimical to the fascist interests enforced by the oligopolists. With vaccine passports increasingly enforced by the travel, entertainment, and essential services sectors. With rampant prosecutorial misconduct those who dissent the tyranny are being made harsh examples.
Los Angeles is a Democrat controlled city. The LAPD went after an Antifa protest (the protesters were lightly armed with knives and pepper spray). I suppose Antifa thought they had also won when Biden did. Hopefully someone is telling the AOC types that if the real commies do win, they will be among the first to go.
The police created a narrative re-inforcing event and the lefty DA will charge them when the need to change to media coverage away from the Texas Twits with Covid is required.
Review in July 1 issue of London Review of Books reveals details of Cuba’s covid vaccine program: 2 vaccines are already in production, and 3 more are in the final stages of clinical trials. Can’t make the powers that be in this country happy.
TTG,
I specifically remember a case of 100% internet blockage by the Iranian government for about two weeks back in Nov. 2019 when the sudden fuel price hikes resulted in mass protests and social unrest throughout the country. I even remember that Brian Hook, the Iran envoy in the Trump admin openly ‘flirting’ with the idea of providing free internet to the people there. He never explained how and based on what mechanism the U.S. would be able to carry it out and the idea soon disappeared.
But here are my questions:
Could the U.S. launch high-altitude transmitters in the form of drones, balloons, or other airborne vessels in order to alleviate the situation in Cuba?
In case the U.S. upped the ante and decided to block Cuba’s internet access as a form of punishment, would it be possible for Russia, and China to help the Cuban government and circumvent this ?
We can launch transmitters, but it’s pointless unless there are appropriate receivers. There are plenty of SAT TV receivers in the hands of the Cuban people. And TV satellites can be repositioned or launched to improve reception. Trying to restore internet service to Cuba by satellite, high altitude drone or balloon is pointless without suitable receivers/transmitters on the ground. Musk’s Starlink would be great if the Cubans had the necessary UFOs on a stick to interface with Starlink satellites. We may be able to transmit internet signal to Cuba’s many GSM smartphones, but those smartphones couldn’t transmit out. Stick to transmitting Radio y Televisión Martí by ground broadcast and satellite.
Cuba used Russia’s Internet Sputnik as their internet connection to the world before the fiber-optic cable to Venezuela came on like. I imagine they can go back to that. I don’t know if China has anything comparable.
Right, I understand now. I was assuming that the smartphones-regular ones- would be capable enough to receive and send transmission only if the U.S. tech would provide internet in case of government blockage.
I could only imagine how much of a powerful tool would Starlink be in the hands of its operators in cases like Cuba, Iran and elsewhere.
If only the Cuban’s had access to these U.S. marketed electronics, I wonder how the Castro’s were so successful in preventing Cubans from getting U.S. made devices. Oh wait, never mind.
For the purpose of this thread, giving Cuba another ‘radio free Caribbean’ where they can receive but not transmit is useless. Isn’t the point of suspending internet access and Biden wanting to restore it, to allow demonstrators to organize?
If Cubans can only receive but not send, then people in the U.S. can transmit instructions to the protesters but the Cuban govt would have a field day using that to discredit them.
Here are some words from John Adams, then Secretary of State, in an address early in the life of the Republic:
“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
This seems to be sage advice. Yes, I know that the Cuban communists were the Traditional Enemy for those of you who fought the good fight against the authoritarian scourge of international communism, and this seems like a great opportunity to see them done and dusted after all of these years.
But may I venture that we have our own pressing problems with authoritarians right here regarding access to a free internet, and we need to be “the champion and vindicator” of ourselves in this regard, first and foremost.
Our authoritarians, at least those likely behind the push to strip us of our rights (and not only our rights, but of our ability to speak together about the steady creep of totalitarianism against our exercise of those rights), are at root fascists, totalizing, globalist fascists, dangerous enough, and relentless enough to demand our full attention as a people, and are as baleful to us as the Cuban communists are to them.
And a further thought – what if the Cuban leaders were to appeal to the CCP for assistance, and the CCP, mindful of our “interference” with their sovereignty over Taiwan, were to take them up on it? As TTG is wont to recount, “What are you going to do know, Ranger?” Do we wish to risk a Cuban Missile Crisis redux? How about we stick to our knitting, and sort out our own would-be tyrants first?