By Jihan Hameed — International Geopolitical Analyst & National Sovereignty Strategist, based in Sri Lanka — THE NATIONALIST 🇱🇰
Submarine cables, cloud data centers, algorithmic narrative control, and foreign AI partnerships expose Sri Lanka’s deep national security vacuum.
Sri Lanka today faces a digital sovereignty crisis far more dangerous than most policymakers and citizens realize. While the public debate remains distracted with surface-level digital reforms and scattered modernization projects, the country’s entire digital infrastructure has been systematically fragmented, externally integrated, and quietly compromised over the past decade.
The Anatomy of Fragmented Digital Control
At first glance, Sri Lanka presents the image of a modernizing digital economy. But beneath that appearance lies a fractured system where:
Submarine cable landing stations are operated under foreign carrier integrations, exposing national communications to external signal interception and routing dependencies.
Telecom switching nodes are licensed to foreign-controlled operators, with core transmission architecture partially outsourced.
Government data, including sensitive national records, is increasingly hosted on foreign-controlled cloud environments, primarily AWS, Azure, and other hyperscalers located outside Sri Lankan jurisdiction.
National AI development pipelines are heavily dependent on foreign technical support, external training datasets, and cross-border algorithmic partnerships, leaving AI sovereignty entirely unprotected.
Behavioral data of Sri Lankan citizens is harvested, profiled, and processed by offshore data brokers, creating detailed psychometric maps of the population that foreign entities now control better than the state itself.
Digital ID databases and biometric repositories operate on software frameworks with foreign developer access layers, leaving identity systems vulnerable to third-party manipulation.
Payment systems and fintech platforms increasingly expose financial transaction metadata to foreign processors, enabling economic profiling of the population.
Foreign-funded NGO programs have quietly inserted digital policy advisors into national institutions under the banner of “capacity building,” shaping internal regulatory frameworks to suit external governance models.
Sri Lanka’s Broken Digital Architecture: The Absence of Sovereign Command
The most alarming factor is the absence of any unified national command structure to consolidate oversight over this fractured system. Instead, authority is fragmented across multiple ministries, semi-autonomous commissions, donor-dependent regulators, and outsourced partnerships. No central Digital Sovereignty Command exists under executive state control.
This leaves Sri Lanka exposed to systemic multi-layered external governance:
External entities control key segments of our physical infrastructure (cables, data centers, satellites).
Foreign algorithms influence national narratives and public discourse through invisible content suppression and algorithmic weighting.
Third-party training programs have effectively written parts of our national digital policy from abroad.
Financial data flows give external actors leverage over both citizens and the economy.
What Has Been Stolen Is Not Data Alone — It Is Command
While territorial borders remain intact, the informational architecture that governs Sri Lanka’s future decision-making, economic stability, and national security is already compromised.
This is not merely data loss. This is command loss.
Sovereign digital infrastructure is not about owning hardware. It is about who controls:
Root authorization layers
Access keys
Data replication privileges
AI algorithm training models
Behavioral analytics pipelines
Cross-border data transmission nodes
Content filtering engines that shape national sentiment
Sri Lanka today does not hold master control over these layers. Instead, it operates on a hybrid multi-vendor architecture where multiple foreign entities hold partial supervisory authority over critical state functions.
The Urgency of a Full Digital Sovereignty Doctrine
What is urgently required is not another piecemeal reform, donor-funded advisory program, or regulatory reshuffle. The state must immediately assert a unified Digital Sovereignty Doctrine that includes:
A full sovereign audit of existing digital penetration across all sectors.
A Presidential-level National Digital Command to centralize control across AI, cloud, telecom, financial data, and narrative platforms.
Repatriation of all government data to domestically controlled sovereign data centers.
A Digital Sovereignty Act recognizing digital space as protected national territory.
A loyalty screening mechanism for all policy architects involved in digital governance to remove covert foreign influence networks.
Algorithmic Defense Systems to neutralize foreign narrative manipulation inside Sri Lanka’s digital discourse.
Digital Sovereignty Is the New National Defense
If Sri Lanka fails to secure its digital space, the consequences will not be felt decades from now. They are already unfolding. Once full behavioral data control, financial metadata access, and AI-driven narrative engineering are externally consolidated, the very identity of the Sri Lankan state will shift from independent governance to external management.
Sovereignty in the 21st century is no longer measured only in land, sea, and air. It is measured by who owns your data, who commands your algorithms, and who writes your national story.
The time to reclaim command is now.
Jihan Hameed
The Nationalist
About the Author
Jihan Hameed is a legal strategist, nationalist policy analyst, and civil-state investigator focusing on sovereignty, national security, and constitutional governance in Sri Lanka. She leads independent research into foreign infiltration, legal-state resistance, and geopolitical subversion across South Asia and the global order.