How White House veterans helped the UAE build a surveillance unit in 9/11's wake that would go on to target activists and journalists as well as terrorists
Reuters : Tweets: @reuters , @kimzetter , @campuscodi , @fpwellman , @attackerman , @sherifmnsour , @bing_chris , @stephennellis , @bing_chris , @dr_ulrichsen , @dnvolz , @reuters , @josephfcox , @evanchill , @bing_chris , and @aaschapiro Tweets: @reuters : A former White House counterterrorism czar helped the UAE build a secret spy unit to monitor threats. The hacking unit later expanded its hunt beyond suspected extremists to target a Saudi women's rights activist, U.N. diplomats and FIFA personnel https://reut.rs/2RzxZ4V pic.twitter.com/53IbtbgNvR Kim Zetter / @kimzetter : Good story from Reuters that builds on original reporting from @JennaMC_Laugh in 2017 that exposed how ex-CIA officers and Richard Clarke helped the UAE develop its spy capabilities. Here's Jenna's original piece: https://foreignpolicy.com/... https://www.reuters.com/... Catalin Cimpanu / @campuscodi : Read of the day, especially for all the infoseccers https://twitter.com/... Fred Wellman / @fpwellman : I knew it would be Richard Clarke before even reading the article. https://twitter.com/... Spencer Ackerman / @attackerman : Excellent reporting, especially on the “loophole” that enabled Americans to do it, one that looks a whole lot like contract fraud. https://twitter.com/... Sherif Mansour / @sherifmnsour : Who is helping UAE spying on international journalists too? a pair of former senior White House leaders, working with ex-NSA spies and Beltway contractors https://www.reuters.com/... Chris Bing / @bing_chris : In the years after 9/11, a cohort of White House veterans arrived in the UAE to build the country's homeland security strategy from the ground up. The Americans recommended the creation of an NSA-like agency. They say they only wanted to fight Al Qaeda. https://www.reuters.com/... Stephen Nellis / @stephennellis : Important special report by @joel_schectman and @Bing_Chris on how former White House officials helped the UAE build out a spy service that hacked email servers run by U.S. firms and cracked down on dissidents. Longer read but worth your time: https://www.reuters.com/... Chris Bing / @bing_chris : But things got out of hand. The US government's controls didn't work. By allowing top government officials to blueprint a spy agency for a human rights violator, it set off a path that would see dozens of NSA-ers help the UAE crack down on domestic dissident. pic.twitter.com/ov399kEKdM Kristian Ulrichsen / @dr_ulrichsen : Extraordinary new details, including the hacking of emails of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung before their UAE office was closed down, and Saudi women's rights advocate Loujain al-Hathloul prior to her arrest in the UAE and subsequent transfer to Saudi Arabia https://www.reuters.com/... Dustin Volz / @dnvolz : “A pair of former senior White House leaders, working with ex-NSA spies and Beltway contractors, played pivotal roles in building a program whose actions are now under scrutiny by federal authorities.” https://www.reuters.com/... @reuters : UAE hackers lured in FIFA personnel with photos of attractive female soccer fans, aiming to steal damaging information about rival Qatar's 2022 World Cup bid. The operation was planned by an American ex-NSA analyst https://reut.rs/2PzKdHQ pic.twitter.com/FbTFOtkkF9 Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Reuters investigates the origins of US contractors hacking for the UAE, which started years before Project Raven proper https://www.reuters.com/... pic.twitter.com/Pzkz7tMXQa Evan Hill / @evanchill : The UAE has had a huge influence on post-9/11 US foreign policy. Insofar as this is about “defeating terrorism,” there's some shared ideology at work. But what's really going on is that a lot of people have been able to make a ton of money. https://www.reuters.com/... Chris Bing / @bing_chris : NEW story by @joel_schectman and myself charts the origins of a secret UAE hacking unit all the way to the White House. One of the most famous counterterrorism experts in our country's history was the original architect of PROJECT RAVEN https://www.reuters.com/... Avi Asher-Schapiro / @aaschapiro : This is a bombshell investigation, revealing deep U.S. involvement & complicity in equipping Gulf autocracies to spy on critics. One telling detail: a State Dept. license for surveilence exports to the UAE *did not* prohibit spying on journalists. https://www.reuters.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This investigation closes a loop that opened years earlier: reporting in 2016 first exposed how Dubai-based DarkMatter was helping the UAE track and hack its own citizens, and January 2019 coverage detailed Project Raven, the unit staffed by more than a dozen ex-US intelligence operatives running exploits like the Karma iMessage hack against iPhones of activists and rival leaders. What the new Reuters piece adds is the origin story — Richard Clarke and other former White House counterterrorism officials designed and built the unit after 9/11, under a State Department export license that never prohibited spying on journalists.
The significance is accountability: the same machinery justified as counterterrorism against Al Qaeda demonstrably widened its target set to Loujain al-Hathloul, U.N. diplomats, and FIFA personnel ahead of Qatar's 2022 World Cup bid contest, including phishing operations run by ex-NSA analysts against email servers hosted at US firms.
First-order effects
- Former White House and NSA personnel who built and staffed the unit face direct reputational and potential legal exposure, since their work is now documented as extending from extremists to a Saudi women's rights activist, diplomats, and FIFA staff.
- The State Department's export-licensing regime for surveillance gear to the UAE comes under immediate scrutiny, because the license governing these exports left spying on journalists unprohibited.
Second-order effects
- US-hosted infrastructure becomes a liability surface: UAE-linked hackers' use of American firms' email servers forces those providers into a defensive posture against clients of their own government's alumni.
- Commercial spyware vendors feel the competitive pull — NSO Group's hundreds of millions of dollars in Gulf-state Pegasus deals show a parallel private market growing alongside government-built units like Raven.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US export controls and oversight of the veteran-intelligence labor market become the structural battleground: the unit's mission creep from Al Qaeda to activists shows that counterterrorism-built capabilities reliably migrate toward domestic repression absent hard licensing limits.
- Gulf states are consolidating an indigenous surveillance-industrial complex — part state-run units built by Western hires, part commercial spyware procurement — reducing long-term dependence on the very US agencies whose alumni they recruited.
The trend: Ex-US intelligence talent is building Gulf states' surveillance apparatuses, and each investigation of mission creep pushes Washington closer to treating the mercenary-spy pipeline as a regulatory problem.