A brain wave reader that can detect lies. Miniature cameras that are placed inside vapers and disposable coffee cups. Massive video cameras zooming in over a mile to capture faces and license plates.
At a police conference in Dubai in March, new technologies for the security forces of the future were put up for sale. Away from the eyes of the general public, the event provided a rare look at the tools now available to law enforcement around the world: better, harder-to-detect surveillance, facial recognition software that automatically tracks people in the cities and computers to break into phones.
Advances in artificial intelligence, drones and facial recognition have created an increasingly global policing business. Israeli hacking software, American investigative tools, and Chinese computer vision algorithms can all be bought and mixed to make a surprisingly effective spy cocktail.
Fueled by increased spending from Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates, the conference host and an aggressive adopter of next-generation security technologies, the event pointed to how mass surveillance tools once thought they were widespread only in China are they proliferating. . The increasing use of technologies signals an era of surveillance based as much on software, data and codes as on officers and weapons, raising questions about the effects on people’s privacy and how political power is exercised.
“A lot of surveillance could be ostensibly benign or used to improve a city,” said Daragh Murray, a senior law professor at Queen Mary University of London who has studied police use of technology. “But the other side of the coin is that 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.”
The gold rush was evident at a convention center in the heart of downtown Dubai, where uniformed police representatives from around the world searched for drones that could be launched and turned on remotely. Chinese camera makers showed off software to identify when crowds gather. American companies like Dell and Cisco had booths offering police services. Cellebrite, an Israeli manufacturer of mobile phone access systems, exhibited inside a “government zone” blocked off from the rest of the conference.
Other companies sold facial recognition glasses and sentiment analysis software, in which an algorithm determines a person’s mood from facial expressions. Some products, like a rifle-mounted Segway, pushed the limits of practicality.
“Today, the police force doesn’t think about the guns or the weapons they carry,” said Maj. Gen. Khalid Alrazooqi, Dubai police’s director general of artificial intelligence. “You are looking for the tools, the technology.”
With its deep pockets, serious security challenges and autocratic rule, the Emirates, a major US ally in the Middle East, has become a case study in the potential and risks of such police technologies. The tools can help stop crime and terrorist attacks, but they can also become an undemocratic buttress of political power.
Under the leadership of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, often referred to by his initials MBZ, the Emirati authorities have policed critics and activists. Amnesty International and other groups have accused the oil-rich country of human rights abuses by its adversaries, including the use of Pegasus spyware for phones made by Israel’s NSO Group. Protests and free speech in the authoritarian monarchy are severely limited, part of what the government has said is an effort to combat Islamic extremism.
An Emirati-based tech company with ties to the country’s leadership, Presight AI, sells software nearly identical to products popular with Chinese police. At the conference, its software used cameras and artificial intelligence to identify people, store data about their appearance, and track their routes as they wandered through the event.
The lack of transparency and oversight of how surveillance technologies are used opens up the possibility of abuse, said Marc O. Jones, author of the book “Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East” and a professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. .
“The region has become so securitized, and under MBZ, the UAE has become so focused on security that there is almost this fetishization of technology,” he said.
Cameras are especially prevalent in the two largest emirates, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Dubai, which is flashier and more carefree, has cameras tucked away in unassuming corners. In Abu Dhabi, the most conservative center of political power, cameras dominate the urban landscape. Gray metal towers that support them in T and L shapes loom over the roads at predictable intervals.
General Alrazooqi, director general of AI for the Dubai Police, said in an interview that the cameras were part of a year-long campaign to become a world leader in police technology, although the emirate, which has a population of about 3.5 million, is known for low crime. In recent years, Emirati officials have visited police departments and companies in China, Europe and the United States looking for ideas. Consultants KPMG and Gartner were hired to help with the process, the general said. Dubai bought facial recognition systems from Chinese companies, including Hikvision and Huawei.
KPMG, Gartner, Huawei and Hikvision declined to comment.
“We choose what is the best practice in each country and try to refine it and inject it into the system we have,” General Alrazooqi said. He added that “the Chinese are the best” at machine vision and facial recognition.
The Middle East has become a “petri dish of different players,” with China, Russia and the United States vying for influence through their technologies, Jones said. The strong presence of Chinese technologies (most of the cameras visible on the streets are Chinese) is a sign of the country’s growing influence in the Persian Gulf.
Dubai Police run next-generation systems from a headquarters north of downtown’s skyscrapers and shopping malls. One such system, a city-wide facial recognition program called Oyoon (Arabic for eyes), can obtain the identity of anyone who passes through one of at least 10,000 cameras, by connecting to a database of customs images. of the airport and the identification cards of the residents. The police also required companies to provide videos of their security systems to a centralized government database.
“He is monitoring the entire city from when you enter the airport until you leave,” General Alrazooqi said. He said the systems served police “clients,” a general term for the public. “People are happy about it,” he said.
The technological capabilities were on display at a police command center, where Dubai officers could view live camera feeds and the locations of all emergency vehicles on a giant screen.
“With technology and smart cameras, if you committed a crime in a minute, I’ll know which way” someone is going, said Lt. Col. Bilal Al Tayer, acting director of the command and control center.
One advanced tool was predictive surveillance software created by Dubai engineers using machine learning that identifies where thieves might strike next. Officials said its 68 percent accuracy rate was double that of an older model. Inside some squad cars, mapping software gives officers specific routes to drive based on crime data.
Another algorithm, based on car accident records, predicted the 4,000 or so most dangerous drivers in Dubai who will receive text message reminders to drive carefully. The most represented category of bad drivers was older men from the United Arab Emirates, followed by older men from South Asia. (Nationality is a factor for the algorithm.)
At the Dubai police fair, officials from the Emirates Ministry of the Interior, which oversees state security and has access to all police cameras, demonstrated how, using a tablet, they could scan the irises of conference attendees and obtain information about when they had entered the country, complete with a recent customs photo. Also on display was an earpiece that is said to detect when a part of the brain linked to memories is activated, something a ministry official said was useful during interrogations to determine whether a suspect was lying.
Walking between the conference booths was Lieutenant General Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri, Commander-in-Chief of the Dubai Police. The new abilities on display, however intrusive, are a means to achieve the utopian and elusive goal of “zero crime,” he said.
“We don’t break people’s privacy,” he added. “We’re just monitoring.”
