Tag: Surveillance

  • University of Michigan has ended private surveillance contracts but the chill on free speech remains

    University of Michigan has ended private surveillance contracts but the chill on free speech remains

    Clare Rigney is a rising second-year student at American University Washington College of Law and a FIRE summer intern.


    After a news story last week that the University of Michigan was paying private investigators to spy on pro-Palestinian student protesters, the school quickly ended its contracts with the surveillance firm.

    In case anyone is unaware, the year is 2025. Not 1984.

    Now the university says this Orwellian practice has ended, but the chill on student speech will likely remain for some time.

    On June 6, The Guardian reported on the story, citing multiple videos and student accounts of investigators cursing at students and threatening them. Between June 2023 and September 2024, U-M reportedly paid about $800,000 to the Detroit-based security company City Shield to carry out this surveillance instead of using the funds to increase the size of the campus police force. 

    Several of the targeted students were members of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality, the local chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine, causing critics to accuse the school of targeting pro-Palestinian speech.

    One student, Josiah Walker, said he counted 30 people following him at different times on and off-campus. (As a precaution, he started parking his car off-campus.) On one occasion, Walker believed a man at a campus protest was following him. The man seemed to have a speech impairment, so Walker felt bad about that assumption. However, he later saw the same man speaking in a completely normal manner. When Walker confronted him, the man pretended Walker was trying to rob him.

    The whole incident was caught on camera.

    On the recording, Walker said, “The degree to which all these entities are willing to go to target me is amazing. Guys, this doesn’t make sense. What are you doing? Leave me alone.”

    To serve their proper function, universities must facilitate an open and collaborative learning environment as a marketplace of ideas. U-M ostensibly knows this, saying it values “an environment where all can participate, are invited to contribute, and have a sense of belonging.” 

    Surveillance and intimidation do not cultivate such an environment. U-M’s surveillance will make students want to look over their shoulders before seeking to use their right to free speech.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling in Healy v. James requires universities to uphold their students’ First Amendment rights. This extends even to students whose speech the university deems offensive or “antithetical” to the school’s goals. 

    In Healy, the Court emphasized the danger of an institution targeting a group of students as particularly dangerous based on their viewpoint, noting, “the precedents of this Court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large.”

    Indeed, an important function of college is to allow students to broaden their horizons and meet different kinds of  people. And freedom of association allows them to seek out individuals whose beliefs align with theirs so that they can work toward a common goal. 

    Unfortunately, universities have used these chilling tactics against student political protestors for years. 

    Amid protests demanding sick pay for frontline workers, the University of Miami in 2020 used facial recognition technology to identify protestors. The university then hauled these students into meetings where they were forced to review Miami’s events policies.

    “The take-home message that we got was basically, We’re watching you,” Esteban Wood, one of the student protesters, later said. 

    When colleges and universities surveil students, they chill speech and promote distrust between student activists and the police meant to protect them.

    In 2018, Campus Safety Magazine revealed that the University of Virginia had contracted with a private service called Social Sentinel. This service used an algorithm to monitor students’ social media posts and, if it deemed it necessary, report them to the police.

    That same year, FIRE reported on a similar situation at the University of North Carolina. During protests over a confederate statue, a UNC campus police officer masqueraded as an approachable civilian named “Victor” in order to gain information from protesters and track their movements. Later, when students confronted “Victor” in a police uniform, he revealed himself as Officer Hector Bridges, explaining he had pretended to be sympathetic to their cause as a part of his “work.” 

    “I”m representing the university right now,” Bridges admitted on video.

    The UNC Police Department later released a statement saying the university had a practice of sending “plain clothes” officers to patrol the statue to purportedly “maintain student and public safety.”

    Chilling student speech in the name of undisclosed and unspecified safety is nothing new. But if it is serious about change, it couldn’t hurt for U-M to start with reviewing its own policies. According to its Division of Public Safety and Security, its role is to foster “a safe and secure environment” where students learn to “challenge the present.” Furthermore, U-M’s Standard Practice Guide section on freedom of speech states that when any non-university security forces are needed, they should know and follow these policies. 

    While it’s possible to imagine a circumstance where student surveillance might be necessary, colleges should keep in mind that courts have generally disfavored such efforts. For example, in White v. Davis, the Supreme Court of California rebuked the Los Angeles Police Department’s unconstitutional surveillance of UCLA students:

    The censorship of totalitarian regimes that so often condemns developments in art, science and politics is but a step removed from the inchoate surveillance of free discussion in the university; such intrusion stifles creativity and to a large degree shackles democracy.

    When colleges and universities surveil students, they chill speech and promote distrust between student activists and the police meant to protect them. That can be dangerous for both the students and the officers. Police investigations will be more difficult if the student body does not trust them enough to cooperate when needed. Students may be less likely to contact the police for legitimate violations. 

    Colleges and universities should empower their students to boldly state their beliefs. That’s simply not possible if they are also hiring outside agencies to spy on them. While we are glad the University of Michigan ended the practice, this case should serve as a reminder that such heavy-handed surveillance tactics have no place at American universities. 

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  • Amazon Doc Probes Student Surveillance Harms – The 74

    Amazon Doc Probes Student Surveillance Harms – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark KeierleberSubscribe here.

    It all began when school officials mistook a blurry image of a Mike and Ike candy for pills. 

    Pennsylvania teenager Blake Robbins found himself at the center of a digital surveillance controversy that gave rise to student privacy debates amid schools’ growing reliance on ed tech. 

    Spy High, a four-part documentary series streaming now on Amazon Prime, puts the focus on a lawsuit filed in 2010 after Robbins’ affluent Pennsylvania school district accused him of dealing drugs — a conclusion officials reached after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in hand. 

    Blake Robbins, then a high school student in Pennsylvania’s affluent Lower Merion School District, speaks to the press about his 2010 lawsuit alleging covert digital surveillance by educators. (Unrealistic Ideas)

    The moment had been captured on the webcam of his school-issued laptop — one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. 

    I caught up with Spy High Director Jody McVeigh-Schultz to discuss why the 15-year-old case offers cautionary lessons about student surveillance gone awry and how it informs contemporary student privacy debates. 

    How student surveillance plays out today: Meet the gatekeepers of students’ private lives. | The 74


    In the news

    Courts block DEI directive: Three federal courts ordered temporary halts on Thursday to Trump’s efforts to cancel student diversity initiatives — and demands for states to pledge allegiance to the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws. | The 74

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that called for school discipline models “rooted in American values and traditional virtues,” taking aim at Obama- and Biden-era efforts to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. | Politico

    U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks about a new autism study during a news conference on April 16, 2025. (Getty Images)

    ‘The history there is deeply, deeply disturbed’: Disability-rights advocates have decried plans at the National Institutes of Health to compile Amerians’ private medical records in a “disease registry” to track children and other people with autism. | The 74

    • Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., faced criticism for recent comments that many kids “were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old.” | ABC News

    A new lawsuit filed by students at military-run schools accuses the Defense Department of harming their learning opportunities by banning books related to “gender ideology” or “divisive equity ideology,” including texts that refer to slavery and sexual harassment prevention. | Military Times

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    California lawmakers are demanding answers after Department of Homeland Security agents visited two Los Angeles elementary schools and asked to speak with five students who the federal agency said “arrived unaccompanied at the border.” | LAist

    ‘We all deserve reparations’: White House aide Stephen Miller said in an interview last week the country “used to have a functioning public school system” until it was destroyed by “open borders.” | The New Republic

    The Justice Department seized thousands of photos and videos in an investigation of a former University of Michigan assistant football coach who was indicted on allegations he hacked into student athletes’ private accounts to steal intimate images. | CBS Sports

    A 48-year-old mother was arrested and accused of bringing a gun to her daughter’s Indiana elementary school and threatening the girl’s teacher over a classroom assignment about flags. While discussing flags, the teacher reportedly referred to a rainbow flag in the classroom with the words “be kind.” | NBC News

    Banning ‘frontal nudity’: A Texas school district has removed lessons on Virginia history from an online learning platform for elementary school students because the commonwealth’s flag depicts the Roman goddess Virtus with an exposed breast. | Axios

    The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month to weigh Trump’s executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, bringing into question a 127-year-old court precedent. | NPR

    A class-action lawsuit accuses tech giant Google of amassing “thousands of data points that span a child’s life” without the consent of students or their parents. | Bloomberg Law

    A Florida teacher is out of a job after she called a student by their preferred name, allegedly violating a 2023 Florida law that requires schools to receive parental permission to refer to students by anything other than their legal names. | Click Orlando

    The vice president of the Buffalo, New York, chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse was arrested and accused of sex crimes against children. | WIVB


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