UAE Hired Swiss Firm to Monitor 11,300 Facebook Users

The United Arab Emirates paid a private Swiss intelligence firm 55,000 euros to build a database of more than 11,300 Facebook users living inside the country, part of a broader state effort to monitor and suppress political expression online. The operation, carried out under the project code name Arnica 2, was delivered to an Emirati client in early 2018, according to a leaked archive from Geneva-based Alp Services reviewed by Drop Site News, which published its findings at https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/uae-alp-services-facebook-crackdown.

The archive was obtained by the French outlet Mediapart and shared with the reporting consortium European Investigative Collaborations. Neither Alp Services nor the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to requests for comment.

The spreadsheets compiled by Alp contained names, places of residence, employment details, and other personal information for Facebook users in the UAE. Inclusion in the database rested largely on social media activity, including likes of pages belonging to news outlets and political groups deemed hostile to the Emirati state. An August 28, 2017 working document labeled “client request” listed ten Facebook pages for investigation, among them Arabic-language outlets UAE71, Arabi21, Al Araby, Rassd, UAE Studies, Emirati Affairs, and Al Dabboor. Three of those outlets had also appeared in demands issued to Qatar in June 2017 by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt during the Gulf standoff, when the bloc sought the closure of Al Jazeera and other outlets it accused Qatar of funding.

The project began one month after the UAE’s general prosecutor warned in June 2017, amid the confrontation with Qatar, that people expressing sympathy for Doha could face up to 15 years in prison. Alp’s planning documents, under the heading “Social media intelligence to identify hostile supporters in your jurisdiction,” offered to identify hundreds of individuals who publicly liked hostile groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, a long-standing fixation of Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed since the Arab Spring. The firm identified roughly 1,000 alleged Brotherhood supporters in the UAE, claiming many worked at various levels of Emirati society, including the Dubai and Abu Dhabi police. The report offered no evidence of affiliation beyond Facebook likes, and an Alp representative suggested in August 2017 that a full-scale analysis could follow if the client wished.

Alp outsourced part of the work to Total Trust Investigations, a subcontractor based in Bucharest, Romania. Alp employee Lionel Badal sent the firm seven search links in August 2017, asking for results in Excel format and stressing that the request was strictly confidential. He forwarded the correspondence to colleagues, including Alp chief Mario Brero. In October 2017, Alp’s Emirati contact, Matar Humaid al-Neyadi, now the UAE’s ambassador to Kuwait, requested a proposal setting out the 55,000 euro budget. Alp billed the amount to ARIAF Studies and Research LLC in Abu Dhabi in December and delivered the data on a USB drive the following month.

The database also included prominent figures. A profile belonging to Ahmed Mansoor, a well-known Emirati human rights activist, identified his location as Dubai and his past employment with the Gulf Center for Human Rights. Mansoor had been arrested in March 2017, before the report was compiled, and was sentenced the following year to ten years in prison over social media posts calling for political reform.

Dr. Andreas Krieg, an academic at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, said it is impossible to establish what happened to the 11,300 individuals without knowing whether the database reached Emirati State Security, but that he would be very concerned about the potential consequences given Abu Dhabi’s security apparatus. The UAE, he said, maintains an extensive internal security system built on digital surveillance and political profiling, aimed not merely at detecting criminal activity but at pre-empting any political mobilization outside state control, for which a database of names, workplaces, and alleged political associations would be extremely valuable.

The archive does not establish that the Arnica 2 project contributed to any prosecutions. But the mapping project unfolded within a legal and political environment that had already criminalized online dissent. A 2012 cybercrimes law effectively banned criticism of senior officials and advocacy of political reform, and by 2017 prison sentences for online expression had become standard practice, as in the cases of Jordanian journalist Tayseer al-Najjar and academic Nasser bin Ghaith. In July 2024, dozens of defendants received life sentences in a mass trial connected to the Justice and Dignity Committee, an advocacy group classified by the government as a terrorist organization, and in March 2025 the Federal Supreme Court rejected appeals of those convictions. What the lists ultimately produced remains unknown, but Alp’s own records show the firm promising further work to confirm whether the people it cataloged were hostile supporters of causes at odds with the Emirati government.