The Intercept published a report by journalist Thea Shattil exposing how US universities have been relying on surveillance companies and intelligence-gathering tools to monitor students who support Palestine.
At the University of Houston, tensions between students and administrators were already high even before students began setting up encampments. Simple acts such as chalk messages supporting Palestine were enough to place university leadership on high alert.
According to the report, students did not know that the University of Houston had contracted Dataminr, an artificial-intelligence surveillance company with a troubling history of violating constitutional rights, to gather open-source intelligence on the pro-Palestine student movement. Using its AI tool “First Alert”, Dataminr collected students’ social-media activity and chat logs and forwarded this data directly to the university administration.
This represents the first detailed account of a US university deploying AI surveillance technology to monitor its own students—an example of how public universities partner with private intelligence firms to suppress student activism and undermine free expression on campus.
More than 20,000 pages of internal records from April and May 2024, obtained by The Intercept through public records requests, reveal a systematic pattern of university surveillance in response to student dissent.
Public universities in California used natural-disaster emergency funds to suppress protests; institutions in Ohio and South Carolina received intelligence briefings from fusion centres; and at the University of Connecticut, administrators panicked over how a local military contractor might react to student involvement in protests.
The investigation shows how universities—while branding themselves as safe havens for free expression—have deepened the imbalance between billion-dollar institutions and peaceful student activists by weaponising surveillance to crush dissent.
The report also offers a preview of the broader crackdown expected as Trump returns to office and demands that universities take harsher action against pro-Palestine activism.
Rory Mir, deputy director of community organising at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “Universities have a duty of care toward their students and their communities. Surveillance systems violate that duty. They create unsafe environments, chill free expression, and erode trust.”
At the University of Houston, the encampment was treated as a security threat. Communications officials used Dataminr to forward real-time alerts—including locations and excerpts of flagged messages—directly to campus police. One Dataminr alert was triggered by a chat extracted from a semi-private Telegram channel called “Ghosts of Palestine”, which read: “University of Houston students rise for Gaza, demanding an end to the genocide.”
First Alert categorised the post as concerning and escalated it to university officials.
According to Dataminr marketing materials, First Alert was originally designed for first responders, enabling rapid reporting of incidents to law-enforcement agencies. But instead of relying on officers to gather information, First Alert automates the process: its algorithms scrape massive amounts of online data, decide what matters, and send curated intelligence to clients.
A follow-up public-records request revealed over 900 First Alert emails sent to a University of Houston administrator in April 2024 alone.
Dataminr has been involved in several scandals, including its surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and abortion-rights activists in 2023. Earlier this year, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine protests in LA.
Across the country, universities used similar tools. Administrators monitored student Instagram posts, scraped screenshots of activist accounts, used campus-surveillance cameras, and even tracked students sleeping in encampments.
One University of Connecticut official emailed colleagues: “They just started waking up. It’s still very quiet. Only two police cars nearby.”
Universities relied on open-source intelligence to decide whether to negotiate with students and ultimately how to dismantle the encampments.
Emily Tucker, director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, described this trend as part of a broader privatisation of US higher education. “Universities that are supposed to serve the public good are behaving like corporate data-extraction machines. Higher education has become entangled with profit-driven digital capitalism,” she said.
The relationship between universities and defence contractors further deepened administrative panic. At the University of Connecticut, students from Students for Justice in Palestine and another activist group blocked the entrance to a military-aircraft manufacturing facility roughly twenty-five miles from campus. Senior administrators immediately worried about how Pratt & Whitney—a major Israeli military contractor and a longtime donor—would react.
Internal emails show administrators scrambling to gather intelligence on students. In one exchange, a police official reassured executives that none of the individuals arrested during the protest were current UConn students. The reply: “You have no idea how happy your message makes me.”
US higher education has long maintained close ties with arms manufacturers—through donations, faculty grants, recruitment events, and partnerships—particularly at elite universities that serve as training grounds for future policymakers.
Tareq Kenney-Shawa, US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, said: “If universities were so confident in Israel’s narrative, they would welcome debate in these critical spaces. Instead, they fear their students.”
Students interviewed by The Intercept said the surveillance pushed them to tighten their digital security—using cheap burner phones and restricting communications around planned demonstrations. Kirk Wolfe, a University of Virginia student threatened with expulsion over a solo protest, said he feared administrators were reading his emails: “The campus waits and watches for things like this.”
He added that the surveillance had a “chilling effect”: “Many told me they agreed with me and wanted to join, but they couldn’t because they feared the university would expose their information.”
The documented surveillance occurred under the Biden administration, before Trump’s return to power and his intensification of the crackdown on pro-Palestine activism. Since then, universities have shared staff and student files with federal agencies while investigating alleged “antisemitic incidents”—often used as pretexts to cut funding or target students for unlawful deportation.
Experts warn that any open-source intelligence gathered by universities could easily be seized by federal law-enforcement agencies seeking to punish those involved in pro-Palestine activism.
As Rory Mir put it: “These surveillance systems have been built quietly for decades. Now we are watching them weaponised openly against freedom of expression.”
