The story has been revealed by multiple Americans who were part of the operation, who admitted to spying on "enemies" of the UAE monarchy including journalists, activists, and foreign governments, but who only had qualms about what they were doing when asked to monitor fellow Americans.
In Stroud's case for example, she was initially recruited by a Maryland-based cybersecurity contractor called CyberPoint which had a contract for advancing UAE hacking operations, but then her team got transferred to a UAE firm called DarkMatter, which brought all decision-making and oversight directly under the control of the Emiratis. This meant further that in recruiting career NSA experts, the UAE was able to bring a wealth of NSA methods, knowledge, and tools for use by their own intelligence service. And interestingly, the report notes, Stroud had previously in her career worked alongside Edward Snowden while still employed by the NSA at a base in Hawaii in 2013.
Reuters uncovered many other such egregious examples of spying on dissidents in the service of Emirati intelligence trying to stamp out speech, which in many cases involved the Project Raven team sweeping up Americans' communications, even when not conducting specific missions on US citizens.
Though we expect that the mainstream networks will likely shrug and yawn at this bombshell Reuters story, given that it doesn't involve Putin or Russia, but merely one of Washington's chief Arab gulf oil and gas allies.