Editor’s note: The implementation of compulsory Digitial Identification programs poses significant questions for many citizens, particularly when such programs are mandated by governments. The Sri Lankan proposal criticized below serves as a sobering case study for citizens of many countries. Catholics are called to consider such programs in light of the principles and values of Catholic Social Teaching. Catholics might ask themselves, for example, how governmentally-mandated digital ID programs relate to the values of truth, freedom, and justice, and the principles of human dignity, subsidiarity and the common good.
Lock Out
The public is repeatedly assured that the human biometrics-based Sri Lanka Unique Digital Identity (SLUDI) is secure[1], convenient[2], and economical[3]. The Ministry of Digital Economy articulates a promise of citizen privacy. Such “privacy” and “security” is shortly to be mandated upon on unsuspecting citizens, refusal of which mandate will disable essential faculties and services, and thereby livelihood and eventually life itself for citizens who refuse it – because this new digital identity apparatus will be made the only means of access.
One tends to imagine that the identity mechanism will only serve to identify. Assuredly, it would be unbelievable that a Sri Lankan citizen shall be reduced to an account at a data centre within which he is continuously evaluated and scored – and through which he will be controlled. Indeed, he will not only be identified, but the digitally connected identity mechanism will become his digital key to a digital lock controlled by the state.
Once entrapped in SLUDI, could it arise that when a citizen does not comply with state-mandated requirements, his financial credit will be debited automatically? In parallel, will his state loyalty score –– used “to regulate social behavior and ensure that those being documented remain trustworthy”[4] as digitally evaluated continuously via a multitude of coordinated inputs, also decrease? And could it be that the state-mandated requirements will no longer be reasonable laws and regulations intended for the common good and the flourishing of the individual? Perhaps it might be illegal – or an indicator of untrustworthiness, to even question the mandates, let alone the system through which they operate.
Utopian Nightmare
Would it be true that the citizen shall be allocated quotas by the state, of what used to be considered fundamental liberties – some of which will be altogether eliminated? Could it be that if you exceed your electricity consumption quota, power supply shall be shut down to your house? If you travel beyond your allocated zonal boundaries[5] or if you attempt to travel where you are not allowed, will you be stopped physically?[6] If movement beyond the boundary is permitted, will your central bank digital money not function in the restricted zone you have entered? If you express a truth such as the exclusivity of marriage to one man and one woman, or question the morality of sodomy, will your means of communication be disabled?
Facial recognition is becoming sufficiently advanced to claim the ability to read your emotions and predict your thoughts. You need not then even violate the rules. The technology will evaluate the likelihood of your violation based on your expressions and behaviour and penalise you for pre-crime[7] – and thought crime.
Access Denied
Could 2030 bring a scenario to this country where hovering cameras recognise your face and your gait – and the central compilers know if you have paid up your taxes or not, or received your latest “vaccine” booster or not – and penalise you instantly? Of course, taxation on the soil the farmer uses to cultivate crops, and even the oxygen you breathe[8], are surely fictional concepts. It would be inconceivable that the data centres consume the rural water supplies, thus forcing populations into smart cities. Perhaps it is far-fetched to presume that the “digital economy” and the colossal budgetary allocation for “digital infrastructure” would be a means of curtailing human freedom and restricting civil liberties. The excuses provided may well be that it is to protect the climate[9], for the sake of “equity”[10] and “inclusivity”[11], to protect children, or for the safety of your money.
When the law is programmed into the digital system, and enforcement and punishment also occur via the digital infrastructure[12], prisons & policemen and courts & judges become redundant. The system architecture will provide immediate digital verdicts without nuance or mercy – and execute sentences instantly. The controllers of the controllers of the system shall merely instruct the remotely located software engineers, and parliamentarians will become (more) redundant – although it is they who are driving this program in obedience to instructions received[13].
Likewise, when money is centralised and programmed, financial institutions & commercial bankers will disappear. Indeed, this global digital identity project is prerequisite to the launch of central bank digital currency (CBDC), and the end of cash. You will then require SLUDI not only to obtain a driving licence, to submit tax money to the state or to obtain a prescription from a physician: it will be required in order to access and to utilise your centralised programmed digital currency – which will be the only kind of money henceforth. Thereby the algorithms of the state shall have total control of whether money shall be accessed by you or not, and for what. Access will be contingent upon total compliance via acceptance of health treatments, endorsement of unnatural social and familial structures, and the acceptance of the violation of human life – all of which the next generation will be sensitised to via the education reforms[14].
The QR Code is You
The digital ID implementation will begin with the scanning of your irises, your fingerprints and your face, to input you as data into the eventually all-encompassing system. Subsequently, you will receive electronic inserts to ensure perpetual bodily connectedness[15]. The Internet of Things will merge with the Internet of Bodies. You and your electronic identity will be fused, and no escape will be possible.
Collaborating Victims
Sri Lankans are oblivious to the implications of the digital identity project which will be proceeded by the central bank digital currencies. Thus far, only a few questions have been asked by concerned citizens. Two FR petitions have been filed in August 2025[16], by Lina Amani Rishard Hamid of The Nationalist organisation, and by Wimal Weerawansa of the National Freedom Front, to halt the implementation of the SLUDI. Their concerns however are related to why the nearly complete e-NIC project was abruptly abandoned and replaced by the SLUDI project. Ms Hamid questions why the concerns of the then Commissioner-General of the Department for the Registration of Persons were over-ridden, and this officer excluded from the SLUDI Implementation Committee initiated by a circular dated 13th July 2025. Mr Weerawansa challenges secretive cabinet decisions which neither parliament nor public were made privy to. The main concern is that biometric data of Sri Lankans will be governed by a foreign body[17] – rather than that Sri Lankans are being digitally incorporated into an internationalist plan for totalitarian global government, and a world with a much reduced and entirely compliant population, where private property and freedom of speech has ceased to be.
Reveille
Are the vaccination cards and vaccine passports being forgotten, while the data centres arise? You submitted your body to concoctions that changed you – if it did not maim or kill you first[18]. You couldn’t go to hospital and get medicine, you couldn’t send children to school, you couldn’t go to work – without this pass-card of compliance. Will a time come when you will recall even the Covidian[19] days with fond nostalgia? – when you drove alone inside a car with a surgical mask through which or around which you believed microscopic viruses could not pass? It is of interest that the SLUDI from the outset is to be applied not only to personal finances but also shall incorporate personal health data – so that no one shall escape the next “vaccine” when it is mandated[20].
Today, QR code systems know, record, and restrict your fuel consumption. When the government changed, every minister was replaced, but the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka continued in office. Telecom towers tell where you are, who you are with, and with whom and when you communicate. Batteries are now sealed into smart phones. The new digital pass-key is soon to arrive – and the lock is fluid.
It is imperative and urgent that the public discovers whether the SLUDI is mere technological progress[21] useful for expanding taxation, enhancing national security and preventing fraud. Or is it a means for surveillance and control, to the detriment of the nation and its people, in which our lawmakers and central bankers merely serve as tools for their foreign masters[22]?
Strange Priorities
National sovereignty is after all merely an expression found in speeches and documents – and Lanka’s budgets, parliamentary bills and policies are evidently determined externally[23]. Sri Lanka, lacking self-sufficiency in energy, having no chemical manufacturing industry, and ensnared in unforgiving perpetual debt[24], allocated in its 2026 national budget[25] Rs 35.6 billion for digitalisation – primarily for the digital identity project and the data centres. Fiscal[26] and corporate prioritisation is evident for the establishment of digital public infrastructure in compliance with United Nations and World Economic Forum themed “sustainable development”[27]. Indeed the state complies with external demands in order that it may be gifted with or entrenched in more debt, among other strategies that eclipse strength and sovereignty.
Safe Censorship
Innocuously named Online Safety Acts[28] are being proposed and have been enacted simultaneously in many countries. These contain vague or absent definitions of terms such as “harmful” or “false information”, thus establishing legal provision for the abolition of dissent. The questioning or revelation of health-, science-, morals-[29], security-related state policies and other endeavours, thereby become a crime. The punishment of such innocent offenders becomes legal, because the evidence they present and the discourse they prompt shall be deemed harmful by those with power to define with expedience. Likewise, truths about human freedom, the natural family, the merit in competence, and the influence of the sun and clouds on the earth’s climate, will be found to be false by “aggrieved” parties.
The asking of whether the next mandatory “vaccine” will also cause myocarditis and aggravate cancers[30], of why we submit to entrapment into petrodollar debt to make citizens poor, or of the national benefit of educational reforms that would sexualise and propagate promiscuity among school children[31], would among other questions indicate punishment for truth-tellers, whistle-blowers and knights-errant.
Associated with the establishment of legislation to provide for censorship via “online safety”, is a trend in global legislation banning children and teens from social media[32]. Can political leaders who enshrine abortion and peddle IVF, who champion no-fault divorce and the “dignity” of public displays of sodomy[33], who rename prostitution and laud the value of “sex-work”, who spur the awakening of concupiscence in pre-pubescent school children[34] and demand the right to pornography – suddenly have become protective of the innocence of children?
The answer lies in the necessity of initially having to enforce the digital ID with its prerequisite biometric measurements upon adults, since it is being imposed by saying that it is a mere replacement of the regular identity system used in association with financial transactions, property ownership and driving licences – all of which happen to be applicable to adults. Thereafter it will be mandated that the digital ID is required to log in to a search engine or any other application, let alone social media and communication channels[35]. Subsequently you will require it to log into your bank accounts[36]. Indeed, you will eventually be able to pay for nothing unless you are captured by the digital ID.
Now, if the internet activity – and thereby all activity in a smart city, of everyone is to be monitored and stored and integrated, anyone without digital ID needs to be declined internet access. For one, those captured by the digital ID need to be prevented from interaction or transaction using the privilege of another who has not been captured, such as a child, because if this were possible, such activity would not be captured. Those who are incorporated into the system shall obtain access, but only through their own biometrically-controlled digital account so that the controllers shall know who it is doing what. Secondly, since those uncaptured by the digital ID cannot have their activity captured without it, they must be prevented access altogether – to begin with. Hence the requirement for age and therewith identity verification of adults, the converse of which is the sudden concern for children and the prevention of access for them.
By the time the children are captured into the digital identity system, it shall already be established that identity-based access is required not only for non-adult activities such as web browsing or social media applications, but also for purchasing a bus ticket, going to a movie – or going to the hospital, which no one can opt out from.
Central Bank Autonomy
Another global legislative trend that Sri Lanka also follows, and Sri Lankan economists and bankers cheer on, is the increasing of the powers and independence of the Central Banks. This will facilitate the creation and control of the central bank digital currency mechanism – and also provide legal justification for the control of “sovereign” states’ money supplies by the central banks and those who own and control central banks – the governments already having signed away the authority they used to have over their own national central banks.
Your earnings and financial investments will convert to controlled currency, and you will be compelled to use it or have no money at all. You spend what you have by a given date after which the money will expire, much like the rewards points at stores, but far sooner. Since traditional bank accounts and even cryptocurrency[37] accounts have been frozen the fact that your centralised digital currency can be frozen if you do not comply with what is required of you should come as no surprise. Like a light being switched on or off, your centralised digital currency can be assigned to you and taken away from you.
New World Order
The deadline of the 2030 Agenda is impending. Digital ID by 2026[38]. Centralised programmable digital currency and a cashless society[39] in 2029. Citizens, now subjects, now humano-electronic hybrids, barred from owning tangible appreciating assets[40], or any means to productivity.
Digital ID is “the sum total of the growing and evolving mass of information about us, our profiles and the history of our activities online.” “This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.” [41]
Every web search, every website, every message, every phone conversation, every financial transaction, every movement will be monitored and scored or immediately controlled, with immediate penalties as applicable.
If a subject refuses this identity system which becomes his only portal into the material necessities of life, or if he dissents in any other quarter, he will be down-rated, then black-listed and eventually turned offline – and become jobless, homeless and devoid of purchasing credits – a nameless numberless codeless nobody, a helpless banished and impotent digital leper. His children confiscated.
Apathy or Action?
Totalitarianism has existed. Socialism has existed. Tyranny has existed. And so have greed and diabolism. Yet, in this age, the thrust is coordinated, global, all-encompassing, pervasive, inescapable, continuous, cumulative and immediate – and enabled and accelerated by the advances in computing capabilities. Even submission, obedience and flattery will not save you because the target for global population is half a billion – down from the current 8.3.
The digital identity system is not an ID, it is a noose. The digital public infrastructure is for the digital gulag that advances in AI technologies will make comprehensive and efficient. The digital ID and the central virtual currency are tools. It is not merely the tools that are to be feared, but the objectives of those who have designed and now wield them. The repercussions on you, your family, society and the nation will be catastrophic. Only a huge informed and united refusal now, can win freedom.
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[1] https://www.adaderana.lk/news.php?nid=111052
[2] https://www.sundaytimes.lk/260607/business-times/superapp-to-consolidate-state-services-644435.html
[3] https://www.icta.lk/projects/digital-government/government-super-app
[4] https://hellopebl.com/resources/blog/chinese-social-credit-system/ i.e. “to control you and keep you compliant”
[6] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-to-Congress-Advanced-Impaired-Driving-Prevention-Technology.pdf – requires all vehicles manufactured in 2027 and after to include a state-controlled remote kill switch
[7] https://www.nfoic.org/blogs/future-policing-using-pre-crime-technology/
[8] If the CEO, Cambridge Institute of Sustainable Leadership, Lindsay Hooper, who, inter alio, is averse to nature being free, has her way https://germany.news-pravda.com/en/germany/2026/04/09/124006.html https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYE4crRO-MF/
[9] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/21/two-decades-on-an-inconvenient-truth-panic-terrible-policy/
[10] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/equity-in-practice
[11] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/inclusivity
[12] Consider the innocuously named and deceptively phrased H R 8250 in the US that will require electronic equipment to have OS that identifies the user.
[14] https://culturavitae.substack.com/p/reform-of-education-system
[15] https://www.azernews.az/region/215811.html
[16] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/sri-lanka-digital-id-faces-a-legal-showdown
[17] https://www.tiktok.com/@jihanhameed12/video/7530643115900718343
[18] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/remedy-remedy
[19] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/the-making-of-a-pandemic
[20] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/vaccines-vaccines Now watch out for the Avian flu.
[22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERQ5fttvbeg Agustín Carstens is General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), essentially the central bank of central banks.
[23] https://culturavitae.substack.com/p/abortion-by-stealth; https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/a-beacon-of-hope-to-the-nation; https://culturavitae.substack.com/p/sinhala-dolawatte-sodomy-bill-raises
[24] https://globalsouthperspectives.substack.com/p/sri-lankas-17th-imf-debt-trap
[26] https://groundviews.org/2024/10/17/poverty-and-malnutrition-in-sri-lanka-an-overview/
[27] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/esg-and-sustainable-development
[28] https://www.parliament.lk/uploads/acts/gbills/english/6311.pdf
[29] https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/fantasies-with-consequences
[31] https://culturavitae.substack.com/p/now-i-know-my-lgb
[32] https://www.life.lk/article/technology/Blocking-Social-Media-for-U16-Draws-Mixed-Reactions-Parents-for-it-children-against/31/21980# Lankan experts chime in
[33] https://database.ilga.org/api/downloader/download/1/LK%20-%20JUD%20-%20SC%20-%20SC%20SD%20No.%2013%20(2023)%20-%20OR-OFF(en).pdf as per ruling of former Sri Lankan Chief Justice Jayasuriya who retired to a post at the United Nations
[34] https://culturavitae.substack.com/p/education-reform
[35] https://slaynews.com/uk-government-announces-digital-id-mandate-all-social-media-users/
[36] The Commercial Bank of Ceylon, purported due to security breaches, has permanently restricted desktop online banking and is forcing clients to move to mobile banking, where your device on which the app is installed also gets registered. It is not unreasonable to question whether the sudden flurry of bank frauds reported in Sri Lanka are being orchestrated to psychologically condition the populace of the need for “secure” digital IDs and “safe” central bank money.
[37] https://news.bitcoin.com/trudeaus-government-warns-more-accounts-will-be-frozen-freedom-convoy-truckers-hold-their-ground/ Even crypto is not cryto after all – and there always was that back door.
[38] https://www.icta.lk/uncategorized-ta/digital-id-project-is-ictas-priority. Sri Lanka’s governmental Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) CEO Mahinda Herath denied conspiracies, unprompted. He states that risks of submitting to the digital ID is comparable to driving a car. Perhaps a car designed to crash with you in it. (accessed 20feb26)
[40] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/youll-own-nothing-and-be-happy
[41] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_INSIGHT_REPORT_Digital%20Identity.pdf
