Virus projects renew questions about UAE's mass surveillance

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Efforts by the United Arab Emirates to fight the coronavirus have renewed questions about mass surveillance in this U.S.-allied federation of seven sheikhdoms.

Experts believe the UAE has one of the highest per-capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world. From the streets of the capital of Abu Dhabi to the tourist attractions of skyscraper-studded Dubai, the cameras keep track of the license plates and faces of those passing by them.

While heralded as a safety measure in a country so far spared from a major militant attack, it also offers its authoritarian government means to track any sign of dissent.

“There is no protection of civil liberties because there are no civil liberties," said Jodi Vittori, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies the UAE.

Dubai and Emirati government officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The UAE's surveillance state can offer the parlor trick of finding your car at the massive, multistory parking garage of Mall of the Emirates, home to an indoor ski slope. But multiplied across the cameras watching public spaces, buses, the driverless Metro, roadways, gas stations and even all the emirate's more than 10,000 taxi cabs, authorities in effect can track people in real time across Dubai. Police also easily gain access to surveillance footage from state-linked developers and other buildings.

A decade ago, Dubai proved those cameras could be quickly used. After the Jan. 19, 2010 assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a Dubai hotel, police quickly pieced together the some three-dozen suspected Israeli Mossad operatives who carried out the killing. They later showed video beginning from the operatives' arrival at the airport to their trailing of al-Mabhouh while...