How U.S. Universities Used Counterterror Fusion Centers to Surveil Student Protests for Palestine
Internal university communications reveal how a network established for post-9/11 intelligence sharing was turned on students protesting genocide.
The post How U.S. Universities Used Counterterror Fusion Centers to Surveil Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.
From a statewide counterterrorism surveillance and intelligence-sharing hub in Ohio, a warning went out to administrators at the Ohio State University: “Currently, we are aware of a demonstration that is planned to take place at Ohio State University this evening (4/25/2024) at 1700 hours. Please see the attached flyers. It is possible that similar events will occur on campuses across Ohio in the coming days.”
Founded in the wake of 9/11 to facilitate information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, fusion centers like Ohio’s Statewide Terrorism Analysis and Crime Center, or STACC, have become yet another way for law enforcement agencies to surveil legally protected First Amendment activities. The 80 fusion centers across the U.S. work with the military, private sector, and other stakeholders to collect vast amounts of information on American citizens in a stated effort to prevent future terror attacks.
In Ohio, it seemed that the counterterrorism surveillance hub was also keeping close tabs on campus events.
It wasn’t just at Ohio State: An investigative series by The Intercept has found that fusion centers were actively involved in monitoring pro-Palestine demonstrations on at least five campuses across the country, as shown in more than 20,000 pages of documents obtained via public records requests exposing U.S. universities’ playbooks for cracking down on pro-Palestine student activism.
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As the documents make clear, not only did universities view the peaceful, student-led demonstrations as a security issue — warranting the outside police and technological surveillance interventions detailed in the rest of this series — but the network of law enforcement bodies responsible for counterterror surveillance operations framed the demonstrations in the same way.
After the Ohio fusion center’s tip-off to the upcoming demonstration, officials in the Ohio State University Police Department worked quickly to assemble an operations plan and shut down the demonstration. “The preferred course of action for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass and other building violations will be arrest and removal from the event space,” wrote then-campus chief of police Kimberly Spears-McNatt in an email to her officers just two hours after the initial warning from Ohio’s primary fusion center. OSUPD and the Ohio State Highway Patrol would go on to clear the encampment that same night, arresting 36 demonstrators.
Fusion centers were designed to facilitate the sharing of already collected intelligence between local, state, and federal agencies, but they have been used to target communities of color and to ever-widen the gray area of allowable surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long advocated against the country’s fusion center network, on the grounds that they conducted overreaching surveillance of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement to environmental activism in Oregon.
“Ohio State has an unwavering commitment to freedom of speech and expression. We do not discuss our security protocols in detail,” a spokesperson for Ohio State said in a statement to The Intercept. Officials at STACC didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
The proliferation of fusion centers has contributed to a scope creep that allows broader and more intricate mass surveillance, said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Between AI assessments of online speech, the swirl of reckless data sharing from fusion centers, and often opaque campus policies, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Mir said.
While the Trump administration has publicized its weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against pro-Palestine protesters — with high-profile attacks including attempts to illegally deport student activists — the documents obtained by The Intercept display its precedent under the Biden administration, when surveillance and repression were coordinated behind the scenes.
“ All of that was happening under Biden,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, “and what we’ve seen with the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025 and Project Esther is really just an acceleration of all of these tools of repression that were in place from before.”
Not only was the groundwork for the Trump administration’s descent into increasingly repressive and illegal tactics laid under Biden, but the investigation revealed that the framework for cracking down on student free speech was also in place before the pro-Palestine encampments.
Among other documentation, The Intercept obtained a copy of Clemson University Police Department’s 2023 Risk Analysis Report, which states: “CUPD participates in regular information and intelligence sharing and assessment with both federal and state partners and receives briefings and updates throughout the year and for specific events/incidents form [sic] the South Carolina Information and Intelligence Center (SCIIC)” — another fusion center.
The normalization of intelligence sharing between campus police departments and federal law enforcement agencies is widespread across U.S. universities, and as pro-Palestine demonstrations escalated across the country in 2024, U.S. universities would lean on their relationships with outside agencies and on intelligence sharing arrangements with not only other universities, but also the state and federal surveillance apparatus.
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Chilling Dissent
OSU was not the only university where fusion centers facilitated briefings, intelligence sharing, and, in some cases, directly involved federal law enforcement agencies. At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where the state tapped funds set aside for natural disasters and major emergencies to pay outside law enforcement officers to clear an occupied building, the university president noted that the partnership would allow them “to gather support from the local Fusion Center to assist with investigative measures.”
Cal Poly Humboldt had already made students’ devices a target for their surveillance, as then-President Tom Jackson confirmed in an email. The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall,” a university building that students occupied for eight days, Jackson wrote. With the help of the FBI – and warrants for the search and seizure of devices – the university could go a step further in punishing the involved students.
The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall.”
In one email exchange, Kyle Winn, a special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco Division, wrote to a sergeant at the university’s police department: “Per our conversation, attached are several different warrants sworn out containing language pertaining to electronic devices. Please utilize them as needed. See you guys next week.”
Cal Poly Humboldt said in a statement to The Intercept that it “remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.”
“The pro-Palestine movement really does face a crisis of repression,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow. “We are up against repressive forces that have always been there, but have never been this advanced. So it’s really important that we don’t underestimate them — the repressive forces that are arrayed against us.”
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In Mir’s view, university administrators should have been wary about unleashing federal surveillance at their schools due to fusion centers’ reputation for infringing on civil rights.
“Fusion centers have also come under fire for sharing dubious intelligence and escalating local police responses to BLM,” Mir said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “For universities to knowingly coordinate and feed more information into these systems to target students puts them in harm’s way and is a threat to their civil rights.”
Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations.
The post How U.S. Universities Used Counterterror Fusion Centers to Surveil Student Protests for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.
