The Obama administration on [April 3] defended its creation of a Twitter-like Cuban communications network [called ZunZuneo] to undermine the Communist government, declaring the secret program was invested and debated" by Congress and wasn't a covert operation that required White House approval. But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said they had known nothing about the effort. An Associated Press investigation found that the network was built with secret shell companies and financed through a foreign bank. The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network was to build a Cuban audience, mostly young people. Then, the plan was to push them toward dissent. Yet its users were neither aware it was created by [USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development] with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes. Josefina Vidal, director of U.S. affairs at Cuba's Foreign Ministry, said ... that the ZunZuneo program "shows once again that the United States government has not renounced its plans of subversion against Cuba, which have as their aim the creation of situations of destabilization in our country to create changes in the public order and toward which it continues to devote multimillion-dollar budgets each year."