In 2016, award-winning Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor - who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates for such unspeakable crimes as insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols,” including its leaders - was the victim of a hacking attempt by NSO Group, an Israel-based cyber warfare firm.
According to the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which analysed the attack, the goal of the operation was to convert Mansoor’s iPhone into a "digital spy in his pocket" - taking control of the camera and microphone and recording the activist’s communications and movements.
This, mind you, was four years before the normalisation of UAE-Israeli relations last month - the culmination of a longstanding, secret love affair between the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms and the Zionist state known for habitually massacring Palestinians and otherwise tormenting the Emiratis’ fellow Arabs.
The targeting of Mansoor is hardly the only instance of pre-normalisation surveillance collaboration. There’s also Falcon Eye, a mass civil surveillance system installed in Abu Dhabi by an Israeli-owned company.
A Middle East Eye article from 2015 quoted a source on the system’s utter creepiness: “Every person is monitored from the moment they leave their doorstep to the moment they return to it. Their work, social and behavioural patterns are recorded, analysed and archived.”
Indeed, the UAE is believed to possess one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras on the planet.
Then there’s DarkMatter, the Emirati cyber-intelligence and hacking firm that has been described as “Big Brother on steroids”. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Abu Dhabi-based outfit employed not only former US National Security Agency personnel, but also former Israeli military intelligence operatives. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.