The United Arab Emirates has become an aggressive adopter of next-generation security technologies as advances in artificial intelligence, drones, and facial recognition give police unmatched security surveillance, reports The New York Times.

A police conference in Dubai in March pointed to how tools of mass surveillance are proliferating outside of countries like China, where authorities can scan phones, track faces, and find out when people leave their homes in one of the world's biggest unstoppable spying networks, and Israel, where the government's response to COVID-19 included a provision permitting the country's internal security agency power to monitor and collect cellphone location data.

"A lot of surveillance could ostensibly be benign or used to improve a city," said Daragh Murray, a senior lecturer of law at Queen Mary University in London who has studied police use of technology.

"But the flip side of the coin is it can give you incredible insight into people's everyday lives. That can have an unintended chilling effect or be a tool for actual repression."

In the Emirates, authorities have surveilled critics and activists and are collecting and analyzing data on a massive and unprecedented scale to keep tabs on its own citizens, according to Le Monde.

Reuters in 2019 reported that a team of former U.S. government intelligence operatives working for the United Arab Emirates hacked into the iPhones of activists, diplomats, and rival foreign leaders with the help of a sophisticated spying tool called Karma, in a campaign that shows how potent cyberweapons are proliferating beyond the world's superpowers and into the hands of smaller nations.

The cybertool allowed the small Gulf country to monitor hundreds of targets beginning in 2016, from the emir of Qatar and a senior Turkish official to a Nobel Peace laureate human rights activist in Yemen, according to five former operatives and program documents reviewed by Reuters. The sources interviewed by Reuters were not Emirati citizens.

"The region has become so securitized, and under [Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan], the UAE has become so focused on security there's almost this fetishization of technology," Marc O. Jones, author of the book "Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East," told the Times.

Information from Reuters was used in this report.

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