There was mass outcry recently in the Dominican Republic when the US State Department canceled the tourist and diplomatic visas of the country's top electoral official, with many people suspecting that it was done to force the Dominican Republic to take up birthright citizenship and start handing out birth certificates to the children of undocumented citizens.
However, it seems that the John Kerry State Department does not have fully altruistic motives when it comes to helping Haitian migrants, with the large-circulation daily Diario Libre reporting that the US Embassy in Santo Domingo recently requested that the Dominican Electoral Commission, whose top official was just humiliated by the US, provide Washington access to the country's biometric database.
The US Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Wally Brewster, warned the Dominican Senate, responsible for determining the composition of the Electoral Commission, that two senators would have their visas canceled should they happen not to yield to demands by the State Department.
Since Dominican adults are required to have a national identity document, providing their fingerprints during the process of its acquisition, the government effectively has the biometrics of nearly every person on the island.
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| First tested on island population. AudElec |
As the Dominican Electoral Commission will be instrumental in Haiti's elections in the coming weeks, Haitians' biometric data is also being demanded by proxy.
The US Embassy in Santo Domingo claims that it wants the biometric data of foreign citizens in order to prevent individuals with false identities from entering the United States, and also to help with investigating persons with mutilated fingerprints.
Although the Federal Bureau of Investigations has a massive database containing data on nearly every US citizen, the Dominican government applies a far more draconian level of control over its population, with a phone app recently being developed to help authorities identify citizens in real-time using just a picture.
The US Embassy in Santo Domingo will get used to having the fingerprint and picture of every person who enters its premises, confirmed in real-time against the Dominican Electoral Commission's database. They'll get so used to it that it will likely spread to other embassies, becoming the norm in many federal facilities before we even realize it.
1984 arrived in the Dominican Republic years ago, with the government currently in the works to start chipping individuals convicted of certain crimes and installing a nationwide chip tracking system, complemented by the ever-rising number of cameras which constantly verify the identity of citizens as they go about their daily business.
Eventually the US Embassy will also request people's daily movement logs, which will be augmented by the Dominican government's plans to deploy blimps utilizing sting ray devices in order to track all of the cellphones on the island.
Once it becomes normal in the Dominican Republic, it will start becoming normal in New York City, and the large number of Dominican police officers in the city will happily use a global biometric database which contains every person's movements in life.
Once something becomes normal in New York City, it's not too long before the rest of the nation is conditioned to accept ever-rising digital tyranny.
The timing of this latest request means that the terror attacks which have recently shaken areas with large numbers of Dominicans help State Department officials apply pressure on Santo Domingo using the excuse of safety.
One thing is certain: the US government has wasted no time in using the latest terror attacks to push foreign governments to sacrifice the privacy of their citizens just a bit more, all on the altar of safety.
