According to officials with the Office of Director of National Intelligence, the Cuban government may use focused campaigns to influence Florida’s state and local elections in 2024.
The evaluation comes after the author’s workplace assessed last yr that , Havana attempted to change congressional elections , in Florida in 2022.
” We’ve seen interest in downballot ethnicities”, one of the intelligence officials said. We sincerely anticipate that the same kind of exercise will take place on Cuba.
According to the intelligence community, Cuba conducted affect businesses in the United States in 2022 to “defame particular U.S. individuals in Florida.”
After the evaluation became people in December last season, U. S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez said he believed he and other Miami Republicans Reps.  , Maria Elvira Salazar and Mario Diaz- Balart had been targeted, though he said he had not been told that instantly by U. S. intelligence officials.
A network of social media accounts “almost undoubtedly secretly tied” to Cuba “almost certainly… disparaging content” on U.S. politicians viewed as unfriendly to the Cuban state, according to a U.S. intelligence report.
Cuba’s initiatives are of worry, even though they are at a smaller size than the intended control strategies of Washington’s big adversaries in Russia, China and Iran, the officials said.
Last month, Meta, Facebook’s family firm, said it had taken down lots of , fraudulent transactions linked to the Caribbean government , and its institutions that were posting advertising on Facebook and Instagram and attacking reviewers in Cuba and the United States.
The Cuban authorities system targeted Cubans both domestically and abroad and reached a wide audience. The Instagram pages had 650, 000 fans, and the parties were joined by 510, 000 records. The Miami Herald recently covered a report on a campaign to expose hundreds of fake Twitter accounts that were posting Dominican propaganda.
Rebels and independent journalists have started criticizing the hacking of their smartphone and social media accounts and receiving online abuse from phony transactions connected to the Cuban government since Cuba started expanding internet service. Former individuals have described how Caribbean state security attacked rebels and critics through online forums operated by the University of Informatics Sciences.
In 2020, Special Envoy Lea Gabrielle, then coordinator of the Global Engagement Center at the U. S. State Department, said the agency had noticed” an increasing alignment of efforts between accounts that promote Russian, Cuban, and ( Venezuelan government ) disinformation and propaganda narratives”.
More recently, Caribbean government figures and celebrities have been very effective in spreading Russian propaganda about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Cuba has relied on China to build its online and security infrastructure, but Cuban authorities have just reached contracts with Russian officials regarding the development of artificial intelligence capabilities.
This time, the U. S. knowledge author’s company’s Foreign Malign Influence Center is preparing for adversaries to build more complicated tools, including AI, in their influence campaigns.
According to the intelligence officials, A.I.-driven threats will be countered by intelligence analysts and experts with commercial and proprietary forensic skills.
Analysts from the intelligence community are on the lookout for potential threats from foreign malign influence, and they have submitted intelligence information that they believe is important for their analysis. The group then decides whether to take action on the item, either by privately informing the target of the attack or by releasing a public notification, which can be anywhere between 24 hours and a week from receiving the material.
” Could this influence the outcome of the election? That is what we’re guided by”, one of the officials said.
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© 2024 Miami Herald
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