Campus Police Are Using Israeli Spy Tech to Crack Down on Student Protest

Within the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump introduced he can be “preventing anti-Semitism” on school campuses by prosecuting and revoking visas for sure college students deemed to be “Hamas sympathizers.” In a fact sheet accompanying an government order with “measures to fight anti-Semitism,” Trump threatens college students: “Come 2025, we are going to discover you, and we are going to deport you.” The order itself states that the Division of Schooling will search to familiarize establishments of upper training with these objectives, in order that universities might “monitor for and report actions by alien college students and workers related to these grounds and for guaranteeing that such studies about aliens lead … to investigations and, if warranted, actions to take away such aliens.” As a result of participation in pro-Palestine actions is commonly equated with antisemitism, advocates and journalists like Etan Nechin, a correspondent from Haaretz, have been fast to identify this as a transfer from “a textbook authoritarian playbook meant to stifle any criticism of what’s happening in Israel.”

The order blends Trump’s fascist insurance policies in opposition to immigrants and his obsession with mass deportations led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) together with his dedication to Israeli occupation. And it dovetails seamlessly with the present surveillance networks many universities have already got in place after the crackdown on college students and neighborhood members in the course of the spring 2024 encampments.

Final yr’s student-led motion for Palestine prompted a response that exposed the police surveillance expertise amassed by campus legislation enforcement businesses throughout america. The photographs of militarized police flooding sanctuaries of upper studying and free speech has prompted public outrage. In some locations, college students and college have reiterated a longstanding name to take away cops of all types from school campuses. In different communities, activists protesting the occupation of Palestine are calling for universities to divest from Israeli entities, together with campus police investments in Israeli surveillance applied sciences that help occupation at dwelling and overseas.

Right this moment, most universities, and even many neighborhood schools, preserve their very own police pressure, along with counting on native metropolis or county police. In response to a 2015 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, amongst public four-year universities with greater than 2,500 college students, about 95 p.c have their very own police departments. Amongst non-public campuses, the determine is way much less, at 38 p.c, as funding a police pressure is dear. Many campus police have rebranded themselves as softer-sounding “public security” officers, however their true function stays the identical: to guard property and different precious academic sources, together with college funding portfolios.

“When push involves shove,” Alex Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn Faculty and writer of The End of Policing, wrote in The Nation, “campus police are not any higher than their off-campus counterparts and must be disbanded.” They’re a “profound menace” to social justice and exist primarily to guard the neoliberal college.

A Historical past of Campus Policing

Regardless of the euphemistic rebrand, campus police have a monitor report of harming the scholars they’re sworn to guard. In 2017, campus police fatally shot a nonbinary Georgia Tech student. Campus police killed a 19-year-old scholar within the foyer of a dorm at Liberty University in 2019. In 2012, campus police shot and killed a California State University, San Bernardino scholar.

This equipment seeks to police the borders of the ivory tower, however the violence inherent to trendy policing usually spills over to impression neighborhood members unaffiliated with universities as nicely. For instance, in 2018, Portland State College (PSU) police shot and killed Jason Washington, a 45-year-old man from the neighborhood who was attempting to interrupt up a combat. In 2015, a College of Cincinnati police officer fatally shot unarmed 43-year-old Sam DuBose throughout a visitors cease.

College students and neighborhood activists have been diligently attempting to restrict the ability of campus police forces. Following the Portland State homicide, college students renewed a #DisarmPSU campaign which first started when the college board voted to provide weapons to the campus police 4 years earlier.

In April 2018, after College of Chicago Police Division (UCPD) officers shot 21-year-old scholar Charles Thomas, college students and neighborhood members launched a #CareNotCops marketing campaign. UCPD is among the largest private police forces within the nation, with roughly 100 officers and an annual price range, scholar newspaper Chicago Maroon reported, of $5.5 million. The College of Chicago butts up in opposition to Chicago’s majority-Black South Aspect, and the UCPD strictly police the border.

Group organizations Black Lives Matter Chicago and Black Youth Challenge 100 (BYP 100) joined within the 2018 protests. The College of Chicago, like different native establishments of upper training, “aren’t solely complicit, however are lively stakeholders within the mass-incarceration, over-policing, displacement and general hurt of Black and Brown communities” defined BYP 100. Organizers have been calling for, amongst different issues, the “disarming of UCPD officers and discount of their price range.”

Lethal Exchanges

Police militarization has been additional accelerated by greater than two decades of “training expeditions” by which 1000’s of U.S. police have traveled to study from Israeli police and army who implement an occupation of Palestinians with assistance from high-tech surveillance technology. Such journeys are additionally a chance for Israeli-based firms to promote their surveillance merchandise. These embrace the mockingly named Nice Systems, which gives digital camera networks; SuperCom, which offers in digital monitoring; and Cellebrite, which makes a speciality of phone-hacking expertise and has offered its merchandise to businesses in at the least 20 states. This affect is detailed by writer Antony Loewenstein in his influential textual content The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. He writes that Israel engages within the surveillance of all Palestinians en masse, “no matter age, location, or intent.”

A report from Deadly Exchange, a marketing campaign launched by Jewish Voice for Peace, particulars how such exchanges “expose US legislation enforcement to the great monitoring and infiltration techniques and applied sciences within the Israeli arsenal, modeling the equipment of a sweeping surveillance state.”

Some universities within the U.S. are additionally complicit in these trainings, such because the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program primarily based at Georgia State College, the place Israeli police are invited to coach U.S. legislation enforcement from main U.S. cities. Activists have known as for ending the GILEE program, sponsored partially by the Atlanta Police Basis, the nonprofit behind the large police training facility south of town often known as “Cop Metropolis.”

In 2019, Wayne State College’s chief of police traveled to Israel “to share law enforcement strategies” as a part of a “delegation” of different law enforcement officials visiting from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. He famous the significance of the college police’s jurisdiction, “not solely [on] campus, but in addition [in] the larger Midtown Detroit space — all neighbors and members of our neighborhood.”

As police attempt to legitimize their rising repression, communities proceed to withstand. In 2020, Tufts College college students voted in a referendum to ban campus police from attending future retreats in Israel. Amnesty International famous that funds spent “to coach our home police in Israel ought to concern all of us,” explaining that many home police abuses documented parallel “violations by Israeli army, safety and police officers.”

Spying From the Ivory Tower

Through the wave of pro-Palestine encampments that swept the nation final spring, campus police took the chance to amplify conventional strong-arm behaviors (which included quite a few violent assaults in opposition to professors and students alike) with newly acquired surveillance expertise. This harmful mixture led to greater than 3,200 arrests nationwide.

Universities supported these efforts by rapidly suspending First Modification rights to peaceful meeting, with some even implementing archaic anti-mask laws in opposition to scholar protesters (initially enacted in response to the Ku Klux Klan) to assist police use of facial recognition software program.

The coed newspaper Columbia Spectator uncovered in September how the administration at Columbia College and Barnard Faculty spied on scholar activists earlier than and after the encampments. Following a “Resistance 101” workshop held by a campus divestment group earlier within the spring, campus police began accumulating info on demonstrators, gathering footage from campus surveillance cameras and monitoring scholar IDs swiped at constructing entrances. Additionally they despatched non-public investigators to interrogate college students at dwelling, Columbia Spectator studies. The administration then started to droop college students, expel them from housing and name them earlier than disciplinary hearings. New York Metropolis Police Division (NYPD) performed a number of sweeps of scholar areas.

In a press convention on Might 1, in the course of the peak of the campus protests, New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams thanked Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who joined him onstage, for “monitoring the scenario” when protests first started throughout town. Professor Weiner, who conveniently moonlights because the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, serves because the liaison between NYPD’s Tel Aviv department (in-built 2012 on the rubble of the destroyed Palestinian village Kfar Saba) and NYPD stateside. Weiner boasted that her workplace in New York had obtained “hourly updates” from the NYPD’s Tel Aviv precinct since October 7, guaranteeing that the militarized military terrorizing Palestinians was aligned with these harming U.S. college students.

At Yale College, the 93-officer non-public police division stored an eye fixed on campus protests with assist from the FBI. As journalist Theia Chatelle reported in Jewish Currents, paperwork obtained from the settlement in a lawsuit for public information revealed that Jennifer Wagner, the top of the FBI’s New Haven workplace, reached out to Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell to supply help: “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests associated to the Israel/Hamas battle at a number of schools and universities.” After an alleged assault in April, the FBI received a search warrant for the house of a pro-Palestine scholar and carried out what Yale Public Security known as a “dump” of data from their mobile phone, a severe invasion of their private property. The Yale Police Division “put in cameras on campus, tracked college students’ social media accounts and monitored college students utilizing aerial drones,” in keeping with Chatelle.

These invasions of privateness preceded a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in opposition to the FBI and different federal businesses in July 2024 over their historical past of focusing on activists and communities of colour “for unwarranted surveillance beneath the false guise of nationwide safety.” Yale Police Division’s surveillance of pro-Palestinian protesters final spring additionally led to the Yale Faculty Council voting simply final month to ascertain a new oversight committee for the Yale Police Division.

Israeli Tech on Campus

One of many nation’s largest public universities, the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has taken a very aggressive method to focusing on activists. It’s presently pursuing felony mob-action prices in opposition to encampment demonstrators, utilizing proof from license plate readers and monitoring social media posts. UIUC is a check case for the militarization of campus police. The College of Illinois Police Division (UIPD) had a total budget in fiscal yr 2022-2023 of $13.5 million. There are presently 2,300 cameras put in all through the campus. The college not too long ago received a federal grant of practically $1 million to ascertain a Real Time Crime Center that may permit police to observe surveillance cameras, search databases and use license plate readers.

Info obtained from public information requests reveal the capabilities of UIPD’s surveillance: In a single occasion, a detective with the UIPD despatched pictures of a scholar protester to the Illinois State Police Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Heart, a fusion middle opened on Might 14, 2003. Images from UIPD have been run by way of facial recognition software program possessed by the fusion middle to efficiently determine the coed, resulting in their prosecution.

Campus and neighborhood activists have discovered that since at the least 2021, the College of Illinois Board of Trustees has contracted with Cellebrite, the Israeli-based firm that sells surveillance expertise and is thought for being the phone-hacking software of choice for the FBI. The board most not too long ago renewed its contract with the tech agency in November 2024, to be used of “Digital Collector” and “Inspector” subscriptions. The previous is marketed as a “must-have software within the digital forensic toolbox … for investigators,” whereas the latter is marketed to search out “Web Historical past, Downloads, Places, Current searches, and extra.” The board has spent at the least $17,464.40 on such expertise, in keeping with info obtained from Illinois Freedom of Info Act requests.

UIUC’s contract renewal comes after greater than a yr of Palestinian ethnic cleaning by Israel, and underscores the college administration’s dedication to Israeli pursuits in direct opposition to the issues of scholar, alumni, college and neighborhood activists. College students have been attempting to cross boycott, divestment, sanctions referenda at UIUC since at the least 2020, to no avail. Lauren Knutsen, a involved alumni who not too long ago spoke out in favor of divestment on the quarterly board assembly, seems like this contract renewal is a slap within the face to scholar activists after every thing that has gone on over the past yr. She informed Truthout that although college students have been asking their college to pay attention, and “they simply proceed to be ignored.”

The college is now a repeat buyer of an organization that has been accused of facilitating human rights abuses by activists for years, together with by Amnesty International. Cellebrite has educational establishments like UIUC to thank for an “wonderful 2024” by which Cellebrite “exceeded [their] authentic income” and different monetary targets, in keeping with interim CEO Thomas E. Hogan. The New York Instances reported that Cellebrite has offered about $54 million in “investigative instruments” to ICE which might now be used to power Trump’s current immigration crackdown.

Partnering with Cellebrite is one weapon in UIUC’s arsenal to stifle scholar speech on campus, a sample of habits that triggered the ACLU of Illinois to situation a scathing letter on January 14, 2025, immediately to college directors. The letter acknowledged amongst different issues that UIUC wanted to train “larger restraint in implementing insurance policies proscribing scholar activism.”

When requested to remark, UIUC Govt Communications and Situation Administration Director Pat Wade claimed that campus police do “not use Cellebrite expertise for surveillance,” and solely use this system for “mobile system extraction and evaluation” with consent or a warrant. He additionally asserted that the college “stays dedicated to creating an setting that fosters free speech.”

Truthout reached out to Cellebrite, however they failed to reply with a remark.

Sana Saboowala, a member of the Champaign-Urbana Muslim Motion Committee and a Ph.D. candidate at UIUC, helped expose this UIUC-Cellebrite connection. As she informed Truthout, “The FBI and ICE have paid millions of dollars to Cellebrite, which is run by former IDF members, and now these army instruments are within the palms of corrupt regimes, ICE and our campus police. It’s unacceptable.” The Muslim Motion Committee was involved, Saboowala says, as a result of “traditionally Muslims have suffered from mass surveillance on this nation, so subsequently our ongoing funding in surveillance expertise at each degree — from campus, to native police, to the federal authorities — is a priority for the Muslim neighborhood.”

Kathryn Clancy, a UIUC professor and member of College for Justice in Palestine, is disturbed by the college’s determination to “make it not possible for college kids to take part safely in protest.” In her view, an essential a part of a college training is “the cultivation of bravery, of standing up for one thing you consider in.” Ultimately, the response to the spring encampment illustrates “that campuses care extra about their property than their college students.”