A cluster of tents had sprung up on the University of Houston's central lawn, surrounded by plywood pallets and keffiyeh-clad students. Tensions with administrators were already high before the tents appeared, with incidents like pro-Palestine chalk messages putting university leaders on high alert.
What the students didn't know at the time was that their university 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," Datminr was scraping students' social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.
This is 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. More than 20,000 pages of documentation covering communications from April and May 2024 show 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. 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."
The University of Houston and Datminr did not respond to multiple requests for comment. At the university, the encampment was treated as an unsafe environment. University communications officials using Datminr forwarded the alerts — which consist of an incident location and an excerpt of the scraped text — directly to the campus police.
A student-led movement for Palestine had sparked a flurry of activity on social media, including posts from the "Ghosts of Palestine" Telegram channel. First Alert flagged it as an incident of concern and forwarded the information to university officials.
Datminr's AI tool, known as First Alert, is designed for use by first responders, sending incident reports to help law enforcement officials gather situational awareness. But instead of relying on officers to collect the intelligence themselves, First Alert relies on Datminr's advanced algorithm to gather massive amounts of data and make decisions.
The company has been implicated in scandals, including domestic surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and abortion rights protesters in 2023. The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine demonstrations in LA.
Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that students' speech should be protected, not chilled by corporate surveillance. "But it's a whole other level of concern when you start contracting with these companies that are using some kind of algorithm to analyze, at scale, people's speech online."
The University of Houston contracted with Datminr to gather intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. The encampment was treated as an unsafe environment, and university communications officials used the AI tool to forward alerts directly to the campus police.
While the University of Houston leaned on Datminr 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. The documents obtained by The Intercept illustrate how the broadening net of on-campus intelligence gathering swept up constitutionally protected speech in the name of "social listening."
University communications officials were often left to do the heavy lifting of hunting down activists' social media accounts to map out planned demonstrations. Posts by local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters of upcoming demonstrations were frequently captured by administrators and forwarded on.
The documents also show that university administrators relied on in-person intelligence gathering, including watching students sleep during a protest at UConn.
U.S. universities used open-source intelligence to monitor the student-led movement for Palestine and inform whether or not they would negotiate, and eventually, how they would clear the encampments. Emily Tucker, executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, situated the development as part of the broader corporatization of U.S. higher education.
"Institutions that are supposed to be for the public good are these corporate products that make them into vehicles for wealth extraction via data products," Tucker told The Intercept. "Universities are becoming more like for-profit branding machines, and at the same time, digital capitalism is exploding."
The surveillance detailed in this investigation took place under the Biden administration, before Trump returned to power and dragged the crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent into the open. Universities have since shared employee and student files with the Trump administration as it continues to investigate "anti-Semitic incidents on campus" — and use the findings as pretext to defund universities or even target students for illegal deportation.
Any open-source intelligence universities gathered could become fair game for federal law enforcement agencies as they work to punish those involved in the student-led movement for Palestine, Mir noted.
What the students didn't know at the time was that their university 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," Datminr was scraping students' social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.
This is 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. More than 20,000 pages of documentation covering communications from April and May 2024 show 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. 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."
The University of Houston and Datminr did not respond to multiple requests for comment. At the university, the encampment was treated as an unsafe environment. University communications officials using Datminr forwarded the alerts — which consist of an incident location and an excerpt of the scraped text — directly to the campus police.
A student-led movement for Palestine had sparked a flurry of activity on social media, including posts from the "Ghosts of Palestine" Telegram channel. First Alert flagged it as an incident of concern and forwarded the information to university officials.
Datminr's AI tool, known as First Alert, is designed for use by first responders, sending incident reports to help law enforcement officials gather situational awareness. But instead of relying on officers to collect the intelligence themselves, First Alert relies on Datminr's advanced algorithm to gather massive amounts of data and make decisions.
The company has been implicated in scandals, including domestic surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 and abortion rights protesters in 2023. The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine demonstrations in LA.
Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that students' speech should be protected, not chilled by corporate surveillance. "But it's a whole other level of concern when you start contracting with these companies that are using some kind of algorithm to analyze, at scale, people's speech online."
The University of Houston contracted with Datminr to gather intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. The encampment was treated as an unsafe environment, and university communications officials used the AI tool to forward alerts directly to the campus police.
While the University of Houston leaned on Datminr 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. The documents obtained by The Intercept illustrate how the broadening net of on-campus intelligence gathering swept up constitutionally protected speech in the name of "social listening."
University communications officials were often left to do the heavy lifting of hunting down activists' social media accounts to map out planned demonstrations. Posts by local Students for Justice in Palestine chapters of upcoming demonstrations were frequently captured by administrators and forwarded on.
The documents also show that university administrators relied on in-person intelligence gathering, including watching students sleep during a protest at UConn.
U.S. universities used open-source intelligence to monitor the student-led movement for Palestine and inform whether or not they would negotiate, and eventually, how they would clear the encampments. Emily Tucker, executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, situated the development as part of the broader corporatization of U.S. higher education.
"Institutions that are supposed to be for the public good are these corporate products that make them into vehicles for wealth extraction via data products," Tucker told The Intercept. "Universities are becoming more like for-profit branding machines, and at the same time, digital capitalism is exploding."
The surveillance detailed in this investigation took place under the Biden administration, before Trump returned to power and dragged the crackdown on pro-Palestine dissent into the open. Universities have since shared employee and student files with the Trump administration as it continues to investigate "anti-Semitic incidents on campus" — and use the findings as pretext to defund universities or even target students for illegal deportation.
Any open-source intelligence universities gathered could become fair game for federal law enforcement agencies as they work to punish those involved in the student-led movement for Palestine, Mir noted.
This whole situation with Datminr and the University of Houston is super concerning 
. I mean, who gives a contract to a company that has such a sketchy record on constitutional rights? It's like they're asking for trouble 
.
. It's not like these students are doing anything wrong, just exercising their right to protest and express themselves 
.
. Like, they're more interested in making money off data than in listening to their students' concerns 
.
. And it's happening under our noses, right in front of us 
.
. We can't let them get away with using surveillance to silence students and stifle free speech 
.
- I mean, what's up with using an algorithm to analyze people's speech online? Shouldn't that be just between friends or something? 
.
. The fact that universities are using AI tools to scrape social media activity and send alerts to campus police without consent is definitely a red flag 
, but it feels like we're caught between two opposing interests here - on one hand, keeping campuses safe and secure, and on the other hand, protecting students' rights to free speech and assembly 
.
? It's not like the students didn't know their social media posts could be shared with the university... but still, it's a slippery slope when corporations are involved in "social listening". And don't even get me started on how this could be used to crack down on dissenting voices. The fact that universities are using AI tools to analyze speech online raises so many red flags 
just another example of how corporations are getting into our personal lives and violating our right to free speech 
the University of Houston's deal with Datminr is a huge red flag 
especially when you consider that their AI tool, First Alert, was originally designed for first responders but was being used by university admins to surveil students' online activity 
it's like they're trying to create an "unsafe environment" to chill dissenting voices 
. Students' free speech is a huge deal, you know? They're just trying to express themselves and make a difference in the world, and then universities start monitoring their online activity and forwarding it to campus cops... it's chilling 
They're more focused on making a profit off their data than on educating students for the greater good. It's like, what happened to the idea of public education being for the benefit of society as a whole? 
. We need more transparency and accountability when it comes to how universities are using surveillance technology and data collection. Anything less is just not acceptable 
like datminr's AI tool is basically a giant snoopbot 
collecting data on students' social media activity without consent 
and sending it 2 admin who r then using it 2 quash protests 
it's wild that u s universities r basically using these private companies 2 monitor their own students 
and the potential for more chilling of free speech 
. we need 2 push back against this kind of surveillance & corporate control 
The fact that UH contracted with this company to surveil student protests on Palestine is just disgusting 
. It's like, what happened at the University of Houston? They used AI tools to monitor students' social media activity and sent alerts to campus police 
. It's all about maintaining power imbalances and silencing dissenting voices 
.
.
. we also need to support student-led movements and advocate for policies that protect free speech and prevent corporate surveillance