USAID's black ops programs for undermining foreign governments go all the way back to the founding of the agency itself. Some of the lowlights include USAID's "Office of Public Safety" and its part in running a CIA front program for training foreign police in torture and terror tactics in Latin America; co-funding (with the CIA) the opium-smuggling Xieng Khouang Air Transport, a private airline for narcotics trafficker (and CIA point man in Laos) General Vang Pao; and co-funding opposition groups in Ukraine (prior to the 2014 coup) with Glenn Greenwald-backer Pierre Omidyar and, of course, George Soros.

• Bankrolling the "Project Democracy" program that became the core of Oliver North's secret government during the Iran-Contra years.
• Manipulating the elections in Nicaragua in 1990 to oust Ortega and the Sandinistas [And NED isn't quite 'finished' in Nicaragua: US meddling machine NED boasts of 'laying groundwork for insurrection' against Nicaraguan government]
• Overthrowing the governments of Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991.
• And backing every major color revolution of the modern period, from the Rose Revolution in Georgia to the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and Orange Revolution in Ukraine a decade ago to the recent unsuccessful "Electric Yerevan" in Armenia, and many others in between...

• Russia confirms Taliban's participation in Afghanistan reconciliation meeting
• Finished with 17 years of US 'help' a homegrown Afghan peace movement is born
• Afghan President Ghani proposes three-month ceasefire with Taliban
• Taliban leader repeats his wish for sincere negotiations with American occupiers
  

Its public relation department held a press conference and managed to spin a scare story of a "Russian threat" around the seized domain names. It did not provide any evidence or explanation how the seized domain names might or might not be related to "Russia". Journalists were pointed to a blog post by Microsoft's president which includes some mumble about "Russia" and "elections" they could pick for quotes. After apparently scaring the bejesus out of the stenographing scribes, the company made sure to emphasize the offer that, if taken up, will give its strategic intelligence department valuable internal insights into election campaigns.

All internet companies that offer services "free of charge" will use the data they acquire through these services for their own needs. They might use it to sell advertisements, to train 'artificial intelligence' networks they can resell, or to get insight into issues that might effect their bottom line.

There is no free lunch.

Those candidates or campaigns that fall for the evidence free "Russian threat" and take up Microsoft's offer will put their data into the hands of way more dangerous organizations. While Microsoft has its main seat outside of the Surveillance Valley, the Snowdon documents, published in 2013, show that it was and is a major part of it:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".