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UAE’s High-Tech Toolkit for Mass Surveillance and Repression

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“The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks.

The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee.

Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’.

After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’.

‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled.

Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters that the NESA [the UAE’s National Electronic Security Authority] division specialising in offensive cyber operations — installing spyware on targets’ mobile phones and computers — had subcontracted this work to US cybersecurity firm CyberPoint. 

These Americans were ready to fight terrorism, and they also fell in with the UAE’s anti-Arab Spring aims, launching repeated attacks on [the engineer and human rights defender Ahmed] Mansoor in particular.

In the mid-2010s Abu Dhabi decided to set up its own organisation, known as DarkMatter, which poached former US intelligence officers from CyberPoint (at huge expense). In September 2021 a US federal court fined three of them — Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke — hundreds of thousands of dollars each, equivalent to the sums they had received from the UAE for their part in operations to destabilise Qatar and spy on US targets. 

Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli NSO Group and currently under the spotlight because it was used to tap the phones of a number of Western politicians and journalists, was used notably against Ahmed Mansoor, who in 2018 was sentenced to ten years in prison for ‘harming the reputation of the state’ among other offences.

The UAE is increasingly turning to China to satisfy its appetite for digital technology, and the decision to award the contract for its 5G network to Huawei has heightened tensions with the US. 

Abu Dhabi thinks the future of war is digital, and is banking on the development of these Chinese technologies.’ The geopolitical consequences of this shift towards China should be closely watched.

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