The United Arab Emirates has become an aggressive adopter of next-generation security technologies as advances in artificial intelligence, drones, and facial recognition give police unmatched security surveillance, reports The New York Times.

A police conference in Dubai in March pointed to how tools of mass surveillance are proliferating outside of countries like China, where authorities can scan phones, track faces, and find out when people leave their homes in one of the world’s biggest unstoppable spying networks, and Israel, where the government’s response to COVID-19 included a provision permitting the country’s internal security agency power to monitor and collect cellphone location data.