How Corporate Partnerships Powered University Surveillance of Palestine Protests

A cluster of tents had sprung up on the University of Houston s central lawn Draped in keffiyehs and 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 mechanism to surveil its own students It s just one example of how community universities worked with private partners to surveil apprentice protests revealing how corporate involvement in higher mentoring can be leveraged against students free expression Related How Universities Used Counterterror Intelligence-Sharing Hubs to Surveil Pro-Palestine Students 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 pro-Palestine encampments and candidate protests More than pages of documentation covering communications from April and May which The Intercept obtained via citizens records requests reveal a systematic pattern of surveillance by U S universities in response to their students dissent Populace 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 trainee 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 attendee 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 society Rory Mir associate director of society organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation narrated The Intercept Surveillance systems are a direct affront to that duty for both It creates an unsafe ecosystem chills speech and destroys trust between students faculty and the administration At the University of Houston the encampment was treated as an unsafe ecosystem University communications administrators using Dataminr forwarded the alerts which consist of an development location and an excerpt of the scraped text directly to the campus police One alert sent by Dataminr to a University of Houston communications official identified a promising pro-Palestine episode based on chat logs it scraped from a semi-private Telegram channel called Ghosts of Palestine University of Houston students rise up for Gaza demanding an end to Genocide the chat stated First Alert flagged it as an situation of concern and forwarded the information to university functionaries According to Dataminr s marketing materials First Alert is designed for use by first responders sending affair reports to help law enforcement executives gather situational awareness But instead of relying on officers to collect the intelligence themselves First Alert relies on Dataminr s advanced algorithm to gather massive amounts of facts and make decisions In short Dataminr s powerful algorithm gathers intelligence selects what it views to be significant and then forwards it to the paying client A follow-up residents records request sent to the University of Houston returned records of more than First Alert emails in the inbox of a university administrator only in April Related LAPD Surveilled Gaza Protests Using This Social Media Tool The AI company has been implicated in a number of scandals including the domestic surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters in and abortion rights protesters in The Intercept informed in April that the Los Angeles Police Department used First Alert to monitor pro-Palestine demonstrations in LA First Alert is one but not the only arrangement that Dataminr offers For newsrooms to corporate giants Dataminr s powerful algorithms power intelligence gathering and threat response for those willing to pay It s concerning enough when you see evidence of university agents scrolling through individual attendee social media that s going to chill people s speech reported Nathan Wessler deputy director of the ACLU s Speech Privacy and Innovation Project But it s a whole other level of concern when you start contracting with these companies that are using selected kind of algorithm to analyze at scale people s speech online The University of Houston and Dataminr did not respond to multiple requests for comment 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 From screenshots of students Instagram posts to the use of on-campus surveillance cameras 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 bureaucrats 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 In other cases university administrators relied on in-person intelligence gathering One set of communication in the documents suggests that at one point University of Connecticut administrators were watching the students in the on-campus encampment sleep They are just beginning to wake up It s still very quiet Just a couple of police cars nearby a UConn administrator wrote to other agents that April Related How California Spent Natural Accident Funds to Quell Apprentice Protests for Palestine U S universities faced with the largest apprentice protest movement in decades used open-source intelligence to monitor the student-led movement for Palestine and to inform whether or not they would negotiate and eventually how they would clear the encampments Emily Tucker the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Mechanism at Georgetown Law situated the rise as part of the broader corporatization of U S higher schooling Institutions that are supposed to be for the constituents good are these corporate products that make them into vehicles for wealth extraction via facts products Tucker advised The Intercept Universities are becoming more like for-profit branding machines and at the same time digital capitalism is exploding At UConn the relationship between the corporate world and higher learning led to a brief panic among university administrators After protesters including members of UConn s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a campus group called Unchained blocked access to a military aircraft manufacturing facility about miles from campus administrators went into a frenzy over what the military contractor would think Ok The P W CEO is pretty upset with us about it right now and is pressing University President Radenka Maric for action wrote Nathan Fuerst to Kimberly Beardsley-Carr both high-level UConn administrators Can you see if UConn PD can proactively reach out If we can determine that no UConn Students were arrested that would be immensely helpful Fuerst was referring to a contractor for the Israeli military called Pratt Whitney a subsidiary of the billion company formerly known as Raytheon and a major UConn donor Both UConn and Pratt Whitney denied that the request occurred pointing out that the military contractor has no CEO Fuerst Beardsley-Carr and Maric did not respond to requests for comment Photo Illustration Fei Liu The Intercept 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 communicated 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 because of it Pratt Whitney has donated millions of dollars to various university initiatives and in April the same month as the protest it was informed 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 operation engineer to write in an email It s wonderful P W and UCONN have done particular great things together After a flurry of emails over the Pratt Whitney arrests on April the UConn administrators concerns were lifted Middletown PD provided me with the names of the individuals arrested during the below happening 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 Read our complete coverage Chilling Dissent It s not just UConn but U S higher development as a whole that has a deep and long-standing relationship with military weapons manufacturers Whether it is endowed professorships Lockheed Martin Days defense industry presence at career fairs or private donations the defense industry has a hold on U S higher learning especially at elite universities which serve as training grounds for high-paying and influential careers These universities are the epicenter the home base of the future generation of Americans future procedures makers commented Tariq Kenney-Shawa Al-Shabaka s U S Strategy Fellow If universities were so confident in Israel s narrative and their narrative being the correct one Kenney-Shawa added they would let that debate in such key spaces play out Specific students who spoke with The Intercept emphasized that as a impact of the surveillance they encountered during the protests they have stepped up their digital prevention using burner phones and limiting communication about possible demonstrations to secure messaging channels The campus is waiting and watching for these kinds of things stated Kirk Wolff a trainee at the University of Virginia who revealed he was threatened with expulsion for a one-man sit-in he staged on campus and expressed fear that university administrators would read his emails The surveillance had a chilling effect in his experience Wolff explained I had so numerous people tell me that they longed to join me that they agreed with me and that they purely could not because they were scared that the school would turn over their information The University of Virginia did not respond to a request for comment on Wolff s declares The surveillance detailed in this review 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 candidate 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 competition for federal law enforcement agencies as they work to punish those involved in the student-led movement for Palestine Mir noted A groundwork of surveillance has been built slowly on multiple college campuses for decades he explained Now very plainly and publicly we have seen it weaponized against speech Research promotion provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations The post How Corporate Partnerships Powered University Surveillance of Palestine Protests appeared first on The Intercept