Source: lived in Dubai for 2.5 years. This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and surveillance, so naturally they will implement th

Source: lived in Dubai for 2.5 years. This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and surveillance, so naturally they will implement this as quickly as possible, paying top dollar to contractors to make it work. I'm sorry if this sounds jaded, but I lived this for 2.5 years, running projects whose sole purpose was pomp and circumstance for various Emiratis who have virtually unlimited (debt funded) budgets. To all those saying it won't work because {{technical reason}} you're probably right, but it won't stop them from overpaying to do so. Some more examples of this: * They have a road toll system called Salik, which is like EZ Pass gone amuck. There are numerous tolls and each give the police the ability to track any car to a small area. So ther is very little auto crime. * There are speed cameras about every 10km, which residents speed up and speed down to "obey" the speed limit. So to whomever was talking about high speed chases: they don't happen. They just wait for the criminal to stop, know exactly where he is, and then apprehend him. * Most projects I worked on had a whole component about being "the best", "the biggest", "the tallest" where we would have to show why {{costly technology}} is the best in the world. There was no definition of "the best" beyond just claiming something. * In my apartment building, there were cameras from outside my door to the carpark in the basement. And they were regularly watched. I know this because the door man would make it a habit of hitting the elevator button for me when I was about a meter away from the elevator, having seen me from CC cameras far below * To those talking about how burqas and hijabs will make this technology impossible: most folks there don't wear traditional, national dress. 87% of the country are westerners who stay there for an average of 2 years and leave. Westerners and low-wage workers are who they want to track anyway. * All internet is filtered by "du" and "Etisalat" (think ATT and Verizon) - by order of the state. But they don't maintain a common block list, so some websites work on du, some on Etisalat. * There are large articles on this, but basically the UAE compelled Blackberry to allow them to install backdoors so that the government could circumvent secure communication (this was back when Blackberry was dominant). And there are many more. I'm not saying other countries don't have these problems. I'm more just listing these things out to show that this is exactly the kind of project that Dubai would love - high technology, spectacle, and above all controlling.