A cluster of tents had sprung up on the University of Houston’s central lawn. Draped in keffiyehs adn surrounded by a barricade of plywood pallets, students stood on a blue tarp spread over the grass.Tensions with administrators were already high before students pitched their tents, with incidents like pro-Palestine chalk messages putting university leaders on high alert.
What the students didn’t know at the time was that the University of Houston had contracted with Dataminr, an artificial intelligence company with a troubling record on constitutional rights to gather open-source intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. Using an AI tool known as “First alert,” Dataminr was scraping students’ social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.
This is the first detailed reporting on how a U.S. university used the AI technology to surveil its own students. It’s just one example of how public universities worked with private partners to surveil student protests, revealing how corporate involvement in higher education can be leveraged against students’ free expression.
This is the final installment in an investigative series on the draconian surveillance practices that universities across the country employed to crack down on the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments and student protests. More than 20,000 pages of documentation covering communications from April and May 2024, wich The Intercept obtained via public records requests, reveal a systematic pattern of surveillance by U.S. universities in response to their students’ dissent. Public universities in California tapped emergency response funds for natural disasters to quell protests; in Ohio and South Carolina, schools received briefings from intelligence-sharing fusion centers; and at the University of Connecticut, student participation in a protest sent administrators into a frenzy over what a local military weapons manufacturer would think.
The series traces how universities, as self-proclaimed safe havens of free speech, exacerbated the preexisting power imbalance between institutions with billion-dollar endowments and a nonviolent student movement by cracking down on the latter. It offers a preview of the crackdown to come under the Trump administration as the president re-entered office and demanded concessions from U.S. universities in an attempt to limit pro-Palestine dissent on college campuses.
“Universities have a duty of care for their students and the local community,” Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept. “Surveillance systems are a direct affront to that duty for both. It creates an unsafe environment, chills speech, and destroys trust between students, faculty, and the administration.”
While the University of houston leaned on dataminr to gather intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine, it is just one example of the open-source intelligence practices used by universities in the spring of 2024. From scanning social media to monitoring encrypted messaging apps, colleges and universities across the country deployed a range of surveillance tactics to track and suppress pro-Palestinian protests, according to documents obtained by The Intercept and interviews with students and organizers.
At the university of Connecticut, administrators contracted with a company called Social Sentinel – now part of Verkada – to monitor student social media activity, flagging posts related to protests and identifying students involved in organizing. Documents show that uconn officials specifically requested Social Sentinel to monitor for keywords like “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “ceasefire.”
“They were literally watching our social media, seeing who was posting what, and identifying organizers,” saeid one UConn student organizer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It felt like we were being treated like criminals for exercising our right to protest.”
The use of these surveillance tools raises serious concerns about academic freedom and the right to protest, experts say. “Universities have a obligation to protect free speech, not to suppress it,” said Palestine Legal attorney Radhika Sainath. “monitoring students’ social media activity and using that facts to target organizers is a clear violation of their rights.”
the documents obtained by The Intercept reveal a coordinated effort by universities to share information about student protests with each other and with law enforcement agencies. In one email, a UConn administrator shared a list of students identified as organizers with officials at another university, warning them to “be aware” of their potential involvement in protests on their campus.
“This is a disturbing pattern of universities collaborating to suppress dissent,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz. “It’s a clear attempt to chill speech and intimidate students who are speaking out on vital issues.”
the surveillance tactics used by universities also raise privacy concerns. social Sentinel, for example, collects data from a wide range of sources, including Facebook, Twitter, instagram, and even public records. The company then uses this data to create detailed profiles of students, tracking their online activity and identifying their political affiliations.
“Students have a right to privacy, and they shouldn’t be subjected to constant surveillance by their universities,” said American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Vera Eidelman. “This kind of monitoring is notably concerning because it can be used to target students based on their political beliefs.”
The Intercept’s reporting comes as student protests over the war in Gaza continue to erupt on college campuses across the country. As universities prepare for another wave of demonstrations, experts warn that the use of surveillance technology is likely to increase.
“Universities need to prioritize protecting students’ rights to free speech and privacy,” said Sainath.”They should not be using surveillance tools to suppress dissent or intimidate students who are speaking out on critically important issues.”
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Beardsley-Carr, in her own email sent four minutes after Fuerst’s, repeated the request: “As you can see below, the President is getting pressure from the CEO of Pratt and Whitney.”
Whether the company made the request or if it was, as UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz told The Intercept, “a misunderstanding,” it’s clear from the communications that UConn administrators were concerned about what the weapons manufacturer would think – and sprang to action, gathering information on students as of it.
Pratt & Whitney has donated millions of dollars to various university initiatives, and in April 2024, the same month as the protest, it was announced that a building on campus would be rededicated as the “Pratt & Whitney Engineering Building.” A partnership between the school and the company received an honorable mention from the governor’s office, prompting a Pratt & Whitney program engineer to write in an email: “It’s fantastic! P&W and UCONN have done some great things together.”
After a flurry of emails over the Pratt & Whitney arrests, on April 25, the UConn administrators’ concerns were lifted. “Middletown PD provided me with the names of the 10 individuals arrested during the below incident. None of the arrestees are current students,” UConn Police Lieutenant Douglas Lussier wrote to Beardsley-Carr.
“You have no idea how happy you just made me,” Beardsley-Carr wrote back.