Students Under Surveillance

Crackdowns on student movements are nothing new. During the 1960s, campus protests against the Vietnam War were routinely surveilled and sometimes violently suppressed. In the run-up to the Iraq War, students were pressured to be silent as post-9/11 patriotic fervor engulfed the country. But the repression against Palestinian solidarity encampments represents the birth of a new era defined by the use of advanced digital technology to surveil and punish. Indeed, digital repression continues to accelerate in scope and sophistication in ways that few could have imagined even several years ago. If it isn’t confronted and rolled back, student protests could become a thing of the past. 

The first of what would become nearly 200 campus protests worldwide emerged within days of the Hamas-led surprise attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s response — heavy and indiscriminate bombardment followed by embargoes of food, water, medicine, fuel and electricity — led sober-minded observers to quickly grasp that Israeli officials were serious about “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth,” as the deputy speaker of the Knesset put it on the day after the attack. By the spring of 2024, encampments were making headlines and keeping the issue in the public eye. Some universities announced reconsiderations of endowment funds; Columbia, a center of student protest, canceled its graduation ceremony. 

The rapid spread of the student encampments was matched by an equally swift rise in surveillance, manipulation and repression, with new digital technologies at the tip of the spear. 

This break with the past is most obvious in the new-generation cameras being deployed. The CCTV cameras of the 20th century were isolated units that produced grainy footage recorded onto a videocassette tape. To review the video, police and investigators had to travel to the physical location of an incident and painstakingly go through hours of footage. But today, software called video management systems (VMS) stitch tens, hundreds or even thousands of digital camera feeds into easily searchable platforms that increasingly employ artificial intelligence. This allows authorities to efficiently search and follow the movements of people across a wide area (e.g. through facial recognition or identifying objects, such as a backpack or a red shirt) and look for patterns (such as heat maps of foot traffic).

This produces a qualitatively different level of surveillance than fuzzy, analog CCTVs stationed in isolation from each other. Information obtained from new video technologies is further bolstered by social media feeds and monitoring technologies that offer treasure troves of data used to identify, profile, monitor and connect protesters. As with VMS, special software has been developed to perform big data analytics. These new tools of repression are central to the story of the Palestinian solidarity student encampments.

Campus authorities first began calling in police to put down the protests during the spring semester of 2024, with Joe Biden still in the White House. By May, over 2,000 students had been arrested, and administrators began striking deals with students to take down their Gaza solidarity encampments in exchange for considerations to divest from Israel. In almost all cases, this turned out to be a deceptive tactic tied to empty promises. In a list published by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement website on Dec. 31, 2024, nearly all of the universities that actually divested from Israel or cut ties with Israeli institutions were outside the U.S., mostly in Europe (followed by Africa and Latin America). In some cases, faculty or students in the U.S. voted to cut ties with Israeli universities or divest from Israeli companies (and, on occasion, military contractors), but university administrators refused to take up these motions.

Before Donald Trump returned to office, the U.S. university system — as distinct from the wishes of many faculty and students — proved itself to be more regressive than its international counterparts. The situation worsened as the media parroted vacuous allegations that protesters reflected “antisemitism,” rather than moral outrage over a genocide. That a genocide is indeed taking place has since been endorsed by the world’s leading association of genocide scholars.

If the first wave of encampments caught universities unprepared, they regained their footing by the fall semester, when reports of surveillance on campuses escalated. A year later, CCTV cameras continue to sprout like mushrooms, social media is increasingly under surveillance, and private investigators are being hired to look into students.

I interviewed students and faculty about their experiences on several campuses. What follows speaks to experiences unfolding across the United States:

The first encampment at the University of Massachusetts, formed on April 29 of last year, was quickly dispersed by police. From there, students regrouped and set up another encampment on May 7, but this time they refused to budge, even after the police arrived. A student I’ll call Will told me that “there was a lot of police brutality,” and around 130 people were arrested in May. Media exposure from the incident mostly focused on police brutality, which had the undesirable consequence of taking the spotlight away from student demands to end the genocide.

To date, 13 UMass students have had their student visas revoked, which has had a predictable chilling effect on protest. “Last spring, we lost a little momentum because of arrests and surveillance,” Will said. “People were more scared to protest, and others wanted the protests to take a more liberal approach” such as “protesting against the Trump administration.”

Foreign students have been among the most vulnerable to digital surveillance, as they have been flagged for protest activity in deportation proceedings. 

“Surveillance of vulnerable groups like immigrants is often a testing ground for technologies that will be used against broader populations in the future,” Lisa Femia, staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties team, told me. “Communities concerned about protecting their members from immigration raids should be aware that surveillance technologies can and will be used to track people and assist authorities engaging in the raids.”

Despite repressive actions carried out by state authorities, Will said he believes the UMass administration “has been better than other campuses” in protecting students against Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics. For instance, the administration set up an angel fund to provide legal assistance to students facing deportation threats. But the administration has still been imposing strict rules to make life difficult for protesters. For example, it “assigned Palestine solidarity protesters the first of ‘three strikes’ for being late to table at the student union” and told them they “can’t have more than two chairs, even though all the other groups have more than two chairs.”

“In general, after the encampment, students have been noticing there’s been a lot more cameras,” Will said. Almost all the buildings on campus now have rotational PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) cameras, as do entrances to student dorms and the campus center (which has new cameras). Inside, there are newer-model cameras in the dorms and other buildings. 

“You really can’t go for a walk without seeing several cameras,” he said. “I believe UMass is the 10th-most surveilled campus in the U.S., in terms of cameras per student.” Footage has been used by UMass police in multiple attempts to prosecute students. 

Filming public spaces is not the only form of surveillance threatening students’ civil rights and liberties. Posting to social media now runs the risk that students will be doxed and vilified. Will said students do not want to be identified by outlets like the Canary Mission — a shadowy right-wing organization that lists and doxes critics of the U.S. and Israel — especially in light of the fact that it’s being used by ICE to identify pro-Palestine students and academics for deportation.

“Projects like the Canary Project contribute to a larger culture of social surveillance by directly sharing surveillance information with government authorities,” Femia said. “This, like other private-public surveillance partnerships, expands the scope of the government’s ability to surveil the general population.”

Other universities are enduring similar forms of digital repression. Just one state away, a student at the University of New Hampshire I’ll call John told me that “things went sideways” at UNH shortly after students formed the first encampment on May 1, 2024. The chief of police showed up in plain clothes and began “attacking students” by wrestling materials out of their hands. Organizing with students from Dartmouth, the “students were hit with pepper bullets, thrown to the ground and chased by state police officers with zip ties,” John said. Students were “assaulted by police for pre-crime” and “arrested on false pretenses.” The media outlet Concord Monitor conducted an in-depth analysis of bodycam footage and found no student assaults on the police. 

Shortly thereafter, police trailers with cameras began appearing around the campus, leading some students to wear masks to avoid being identified and doxed. As many as 12 New Hampshire law enforcement agencies have now undergone training with ICE — including the New Hampshire State Police — and students are concerned that authorities will identify foreign student protesters and then “hand them over to ICE on a silver platter,” John said. Some are staying off social media in fears of being doxed; others are staying away from campus, have left the state “due to threats of deportation and arrests” and are finishing their degrees remotely, or “have become passive allies or in the background instead of active in fear of retaliation.”

With a fearful student body in hiding, the university has now shifted to public relations mode. John said UNH is “slowly getting rid of some of the cameras, likely for reputation reasons, as the university is struggling not to appear as if it is violating students’ rights, trying to look like they support freedom of speech and activism.” 

This episode suggests that if universities receive enough negative press, they can be pressured to roll back their surveillance infrastructure. And if one university can be forced to cut out digital repression, it may embolden activists at other universities to push for the same outcome at their own institutions. 

Some of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with are not yet aware of the technological capabilities of smart camera networks and social media monitoring tools, whereas others are just beginning to investigate them. What they all understand is that members of the university have a constitutionally protected right to protest that is being threatened by increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies.

When video surveillance cameras were being introduced in the 1960s, the courts ruled that they were permissible so long as they were in public spaces. Therefore, if you or I snapped a picture in public with other people in the background, for example, the people in the background could not claim their privacy was being violated because they were in a public space. This has led many college administrations to defend the cameras by contending that the public has “no right to privacy in public spaces.”

Yet, as noted, today’s smart camera networks are a different animal, as they enable total surveillance of public spaces.

Most universities do not disclose which technologies they are using, but a growing number have adopted advanced capabilities such as those provided by Briefcam, an Israeli video analytics firm whose “compressed motion” cameras are used to surveil both Palestinians and U.S. university students. This tech dovetails with other tools used to map out networks of people to identify their relationships, a capability and practice that poses a major threat to freedom of association. Software like ShadowDragon — run on infrastructure provided by tech giants like Microsoft — are being used by law enforcement agencies and national security agencies to stitch together information from social media platforms, websites, fintech service providers and even dating apps so that investigators can identify persons of interest and map out networks of groups and individuals. 

“The federal government has made several announcements that it will be using social media surveillance tools to mass monitor the social media posts of noncitizen visa holders, and especially student visa holders,” Femia said. “Students and student protests have been especially targeted, which chills not only political speech but also academic freedom. In the U.S., the federal government has made several announcements that it will be using social media surveillance tools to mass monitor the social media posts of noncitizen visa holders, and especially student visa holders,” she added.

What should be done about the proliferation of advanced surveillance tools on campuses?  Social justice advocates could challenge them in the courts as unconstitutional tools that should have no presence in a free society. Yet, with each day that goes by, more and more cameras are being installed, with more and more contracts inked with high-tech surveillance providers. 

Meanwhile, there is a throwback push to weaponize that oldest form of surveillance: the students themselves. New policies and Title VI procedures, which ban discrimination, are being used against faculty on grounds that critiques of Israel are antisemitic. 

“Complaints initiate a meeting with the Title VI coordinator and a possible investigation,” said a professor I’ll call Mark, who works at a small liberal arts college. “There is an obvious chilling effect on the faculty. People are afraid to discuss the Israel-Palestine issue or even teach the history of the Middle East.”