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A private intelligence firm working for the United Arab Emirates compiled a database of thousands of Facebook users living inside the country—using their social media activity, including likes of news outlets critical of the UAE—to identify what the firm described as “hostile” individuals during a broader crackdown on political expression in the country.
Information about the database comes from a leaked archive from Geneva-based Alp Services reviewed by Drop Site News. The social media mapping operation resulted in the creation of a series of spreadsheets with over 11,300 entries for Facebook users living in the UAE including their names, places of residence, employment, and other personal information.
The criteria for inclusion in the database—submitted to an Emirati client in January 2018—included liking Facebook pages published by news outlets and political groups deemed hostile to the UAE. Documents contained in the archive show that the firm received €55,000 for the work, carried out under the project code name “Arnica 2.”
The UAE has continued to aggressively monitor social media for any signs of dissent, with hundreds of individuals detained this year over their online posts related to the Iran war.
The archive was obtained by Mediapart and provided to the reporting consortium European Investigative Collaborations. Drop Site previously reported on Alp Services’ work for the UAE on a planned smear campaign targeting American Muslims. Other details from the archive were previously reported by the New Yorker.
Alp Services and the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.
The Facebook mapping project began during a particularly dangerous period for political expression inside the Emirates. In June 2017, amid an escalating confrontation with Qatar—which included a blockade against that country—the country’s general prosecutor warned that people expressing sympathy for Doha or objections to the government’s measures against it could face up to 15 years in prison. Initial work on the Alp project began one month after this warning.
The Arnica 2 project was proposed to help identify alleged political threats inside the UAE. In addition to cataloging critics of the UAE’s policy toward Qatar, the project also offered to help target alleged supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood—a fixation of the Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed since the Arab Spring.
In a planning document produced by Alp, under the heading “Social media intelligence to identify hostile supporters in your jurisdiction,” the firm laid out the assistance it could offer to Abu Dhabi in its crackdown.
“Through our team of in-house social media intelligence analysts, we could identify hundreds of individuals based in your country that publicly ‘like’ hostile groups, especially the MB,” the firm wrote, offering to use its “proprietary tools and advanced mapping software,” to find “interesting intelligence and new leads.”
Alp identified approximately 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood “supporters” who lived in the UAE, claiming that many of them were employed at different levels of Emirati society or in its security services. “Amongst them, we notably find people who declare working for either the Dubai or the Abu Dhabi police, as well as numerous teachers, students and other employees,” Alp wrote in a July 2017 report. The document, which included personal information about these individuals, some of whose names were duplicated in the archive, did not provide evidence substantiating their affiliation beyond likes for Facebook pages affiliated with the Brotherhood or Arabic-language news outlets critical of UAE policies.
Alp appeared to treat this research as preliminary work that could be used to showcase the services it could offer Abu Dhabi in digging deeper to find possible dissent. “While we already have some preliminary ‘raw’ findings, should the topic be of interest to you, we could launch a full-scale analysis,” a representative of Alp wrote in an August 2017 message.
Thousands of ordinary individuals residing in the country are included in several spreadsheets compiled by Alp for its Emirati client. The lists include individuals identified by their employment as engineers, pharmacists, restaurant workers, and others whose only recorded connection to the investigation was membership in Facebook groups or liked pages.
“We cannot establish what happened to the 11,300 individuals without knowing whether the database was passed to Emirati State Security and subsequently used operationally. But given what we know about Abu Dhabi’s security apparatus, I would be very concerned about the potential consequences”, said Dr. Andreas Krieg, an academic focused on the Middle East at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London.
Krieg added that the UAE has an extensive internal security apparatus based on digital surveillance, intelligence gathering and political profiling. “Its principal objective is not simply to identify criminal activity but to detect and pre-empt any form of political mobilisation outside state control,” he said. “A database containing people’s names, workplaces, residences and alleged political associations would be extremely valuable to that apparatus.”
In addition to this mass sweep of alleged dissidents found on social media, some well-known individuals and organizations involved in political and human rights activism also seem to have been profiled. Among them was a profile belonging to Ahmed Mansoor, identifying his location as Dubai and past employment with the Gulf Center for Human Rights. Mansoor, a prominent Emirati human rights activist who served on the advisory board of the center, had already been arrested in March 2017, several months before the report was compiled. The following year he was sentenced to ten years in prison over Facebook and Twitter posts calling for political reform in the UAE.
“Strictly Confidential”
An August 28, 2017 working document labeled “client request” listed ten Facebook pages for investigation, with its search links combining a filter for apparent UAE residents with one for people who liked each page. The pages included those for Arabic-language news outlets UAE71, Arabi21, Al Araby, Rassd, UAE Studies, Emirati Affairs, and Al Dabboor.
Three of those outlets—Arabi21, Rassd, and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed—had also appeared in the demands issued to Qatar that June by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt amid the standoff between Doha and those countries over the Arab Spring. The bloc sought their closure, along with Al Jazeera and other outlets it accused Qatar of funding.
Alp outsourced part of the Facebook mapping project to a subcontractor firm called Total Trust Investigations, based in Bucharest, Romania, according to documents in the archive. On August 31, 2017, Alp employee Lionel Badal sent a contact there seven search links and asked for names and profile information to be provided in Excel format.
Total Trust Investigations did not respond to a request for comment.
“Some will be so long that we cannot scroll down to see how many people there are,” he wrote. “Obviously, if your IT can develop a small software to do the job automatically, that would be even better,” he added. “Of course, and as always, this request is strictly confidential.”
Badal forwarded the correspondence to colleagues, including Alp chief Mario Brero, identifying the lists as Arnica 2 material.
In October 2017, Alp’s Emirati contact, Matar Humaid al-Neyadi, who currently serves as the UAE’s ambassador to Kuwait, requested and received a proposal from Alp that set out a 55,000 euro budget for analyzing 10 Facebook pages and their audiences. Internal records show Alp billed that amount to ARIAF Studies and Research LLC in Abu Dhabi in December, and delivered the data on a USB drive the following month.
Chilled Speech
Alp’s internal documents do not establish what consequences followed from the lists it provided the UAE. But the mapping project came at a time when UAE authorities were increasingly seeking to prosecute online political expression.
The crackdown had roots in the Arab Spring. In 2011, with demands spreading across the region for political change, a group of 133 Emirati citizens signed a petition asking for the establishment of an elected Federal National Council that would enjoy some legislative powers. The request was denied and the government began repressing political dissent of all types, accusing critics of association with the Muslim Brotherhood and even expanding its efforts globally.
“The Brotherhood has become a catch-all category through which Abu Dhabi can delegitimize political opponents, independent Muslim organisations, journalists, academics and civil society actors. Some of these individuals have genuine connections to Islamist movements. Many do not,” said Krieg. “The underlying logic is guilt by association, where extremely tenuous relationships are transformed into evidence of a supposedly coordinated transnational conspiracy.”
In November 2012, the Emirati government passed a cybercrimes law that set out new offenses, effectively banning criticism of senior Emirati officials and advocacy of political reform. Human Rights Watch officials described the new law as an attempt to ban “even the most tempered criticism” of Abu Dhabi and its regional policies.
By the time Alp began compiling its Facebook lists, prison sentences for online expression had already become standard practice. In March 2017, a UAE court sentenced Jordanian journalist Tayseer al-Najjar to three years in prison and a large fine over Facebook posts criticizing Egypt, Israel, and Gulf countries. Later that month, academic Nasser bin Ghaith received a ten-year sentence on charges that included comments on Twitter about his treatment in an earlier prosecution. Amnesty International described bin Ghaith as a prisoner of conscience and denounced the allegations against him based on his social media posts as “ludicrous.”
In July 2024, dozens of defendants in a new mass trial received life sentences for their involvement in a political advocacy group called the Justice and Dignity Committee, which the Emirati government had classified as a terrorist organization. The evidence, and even the allegations against the group—which has been described as an independent advocacy group with no involvement in political violence by Human Rights Watch—has been kept under strict control by the Emirati government. In March 2025, the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court rejected appeals of the convictions.
The archive of Alp documents does not establish that the Arnica 2 project contributed to any of these prosecutions. But in its July 2017 report highlighting the tenuous online connections of teachers and police officers to human rights and civil society groups, the company promised to work harder to find evidence that could be used to determine that they were “hostile supporters” of causes at odds with the Emirati government.
“Of course, further enquiries would be required in order to confirm this initial intelligence,” an Alp representative wrote, “but work is ongoing.”
