Israeli Surveillance Company Sells Tech to UAE, KSA
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A CBC report revealed that an Israeli surveillance company is looking to arrange the sale of surveillance tech to the UAE and Saudi Arabia - despite very troubling human rights records for all three.
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Former prime minister Stephen Harper and the UAE's de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed, meet in Abu Dhabi in December 2019.
CBC News revealed that an Israeli surveillance company is in the process of incorporating a subsidiary in the UAE.
CBC News reported that former Canadian PM Stephen Harper, who heads the advisory of a Toronto-based surveillance company, AWZ Ventures, is now looking to facilitate the sale of advanced surveillance tech to the UAE.
The company the former PM heads finances Israeli surveillance tech systems, and that includes facial recognition, crowd detection systems, and certain services that deliver personal information in real-time.
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Crowd detection systems in the surveillance equipment (Vimeo via CBS News)
CBC News reported that AWZ Ventures is currently in the process of incorporating a subsidiary in the UAE, AWZ Horizons, which the company will base in Abu Dhabi.
The subsidiary is to be headed by former Canadian diplomat Katherine Verrier-Fréchette, which had been assigned by AWZ with facilitating the sale of cybersecurity technology to several countries in West Asia and North Africa, such as Saudi Arabia. Both the UAE, with which AWZ is aiming to establish relations, and the KSA, with which AWZ has done business, have been reported as having committed grave human rights abuses and have a troubling human rights record. The decision to facilitate the possession of such technologies by countries with such a record is being condemned by human rights experts and activists in Canada, the UK, and several other countries.
In an email in response to Radio-Canada's questions regarding the technologies, AWZ's co-founder and spokesperson, Yaron Ashkenazi, said the firm invests in "defensive security technologies designed so that they cannot be circumvented or reverse engineered for nefarious purposes."
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Israeli tech company Corsight, an AWZ Ventures’ portfolio company, has developed a real-time facial recognition system that can identify people even when their faces are partially covered by masks (CORSIGHT via CBC News)
Saudi Arabia and the UAE were previously found to be using Israeli tech against foreign nationals, heads of states, and even their own citizens, dissidents, and human rights activists: Exhibit A would be Pegasus.
