Keyword ‣ Bill Gates
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With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations 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 Program (UNDP) said its “50 in 5” campaign will encourage the building of an “underlying network of components” including “digital payments, identification and exchange systems data”, which will serve as a “critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.

“The campaign's goal is for 50 countries to have designed, implemented and scaled up at least one component of the IPN in a safe, inclusive and interoperable manner in five years,” UNDP said.

Criticisms of the campaign include Tim Hinchliffe, editor-in-chief of The Sociable, who told The Defender that IPN “is a surveillance and control mechanism 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 social credit systems.”

UNDP is leading the “50-in-5” campaign with the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure, Co-Develop and the Alliance for Digital Public Goods. Supporters of the initiative include GovStack, the Inter-American Development Bank and UNICEF, as well as the Gates Foundation.

In September 2022, the Gates Foundation allocated $200 million “to expand global digital public infrastructure,” part of a broader plan to fund $1,27 billion in “health commitments.” and development” with the aim of achieving the SDGs by 2030.

The Gates Foundation said at the time that the funding was intended to promote the expansion of “infrastructure that low- and middle-income countries can use to become more resilient to crises such as food shortages, threats to public health and climate change, as well as to help economic recovery and the fight against pandemics”.

Greg Glaser, a California privacy lawyer, called the 50-in-5 campaign a “totalitarian nightmare” and a “dystopian” initiative aimed at small countries “to bring them on board with digital ID.” , digital wallets, digital legislation, digital voting and much more”.

“For political reasons, UN guys like Gates can't openly plan a 'world government,' so they use different phrases like 'global partnership' and 'Agenda 2030,'” Mr. Glaser told The Defender. People can add “50 in 5” to the growing list of dystopian expressions.

Another California privacy attorney, Richard Jaffe, expressed similar sentiments, telling The Defender that the “50-in-5” initiative “focuses on the much more important issue of globalization, centralization and digitization of personal data around the world.

“My short-term concern is that bad actors, that is, individuals and small groups, as well as malicious state actors, will now have a fantastic new target or new tool to threaten the normal functioning of less technologically sophisticated countries,” he said.

Mr. Jaffe said the fact that Mr. Gates was involved frightened him to no end. Derrick Broze, editor-in-chief of the Conscious Resistance Network, told The Defender that this is “another sign that this new push for digital ID infrastructure will not benefit the average person ”.

“Projects like this only benefit governments that want to track their populations and companies that want to study our daily habits and movements to sell us products,” Broze said.

Initiatives to promote the IPN at the global level also benefit from the support of the G20. According to The Economist, during the G20 summit held in September in New Delhi under the slogan “One land, one family, one future”, India obtained the support of the Gates Foundation, the UNDP and the World Bank in favor of plan to develop a global repository of IPN technologies.

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