With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations (U.N.) this month launched an "ambitious-country-led campaign" to promote and accelerate the development of a global digital public infrastructure (DPI).
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said its "50-in-5" campaign will spur the construction of "an underlying network of components" that includes "digital payments, ID, and data exchange system," which will serve as "a critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)."
"The goal of the campaign is for 50 countries to have designed, implemented, and scaled at least one DPI component in a safe, inclusive, and interoperable manner in five years," the UNDP stated.
Critics of the campaign include Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, who told The Defender he believes DPI "is a mechanism for surveillance and control that combines digital ID, central bank digital currencies [CBDC], vaccine passports and carbon footprint tracking data, paving the way for 15-minute smart cities, future lockdowns and systems of social credit."
Comment: Evidently those spies mean a lot to the US, and Moscow likely has good reason for wanting to ensure that they serve their sentence: