José R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.

Even as the world marvels at the ways in which social media can work to undermine undemocratic regimes, the flip side is that the same new communications technologies can be exploited by those regimes to further repress and control their populations.

As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner recently noted, “We are seeing a growing number of repressive regimes get hold of the latest, greatest Western technologies and use them to spy on their own citizens for the purpose of quashing peaceful political dissent or even information that would allow citizens to know what is happening in their communities.”

Indeed, the opportunities have not been lost on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.  Ahead of the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, his loyalists have begun employing such technologies to hack into the websites and Twitter accounts of his political opponents and other critics.

Already, the website and Twitter accounts of candidates Henrique Capriles Radonski and Diego Arria have been hacked, as well as those of prominent pollster Luis Vicente León, journalists, opposition news sites like LaPatilla.com, and numerous other sites and Twitter accounts of Chávez critics.

The hackings range from posting vitriolic comments against the opposition to more subtle faux posts meant to foment internal discord and division among the opposition. One hacker group calling itself N33 even uses a chavista red beret as its calling card.

One could be tempted to dismiss such hacking as typical chavista political dirty tricks that should surprise no one. From his first re-election, Chávez and his supporters have employed every measure legal or illegal to tilt the political playing field in his favor.

Yet, there are ominous signs that this is just the tip of the technological iceberg when it comes to the government invading citizens’ privacy and monitoring their actions, movements, and political orientation.

According to Anthony Daquin, a Venezuelan computer engineer who formerly advised the Venezuelan Ministry of Interior and Justice, the Chávez government is working with Cuba to implement a new electronic national identity system that would allow the government to instantly monitor private and sensitive personal information on each Venezuelan citizen, including how much they earn, where they live, what property they own, and what their political leanings are.

Daquin, who is seeking political asylum in the United States, told Miami’s El Nuevo Herald that he had a falling out with the government and its Cuban advisors when he objected to the new technology because of how it could be abused by gathering sensitive data about a person without their consent.

Chávez long ago outsourced the management of Venezuelan national identity cards and passports to the Cubans, who have developed an enormous data base of information about Venezuelans that will now be transferred to their identity cards using an embedded microchip that can be monitored – a technology, known as RFID, that has generated protests from privacy advocates around the world.

Clearly, the Cuban hand betrays a nefarious purpose in the introduction of such technologies to Venezuela. The Castro regime has succeeded in only one thing in its 50 years in power: controlling its citizens. Whether it is hacking the websites and Twitter accounts of the Venezuelan opposition and other Chávez critics or managing the national identity card system, there is no other purpose but to help maintain Chávez and his successors in perpetual power.

Systematic violations of privacy remind us of the significant obstacles that confront Venezuela’s democratic opposition in trying to unseat Hugo Chávez at the ballot box. They also are a stark reminder of the long-term dangers to individual freedoms in Venezuela. It also demonstrates the lengths to which those with vested interests in chavismo will go to ensure that it continues, in the event Chávez succumbs to cancer. Unless the true champions of democracy in the region demand some level of fealty to the democratic process, Venezuela will continue to spiral into a full-fledged police state.