A dozen universities in the UK are facing criticism after a joint investigation by Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates revealed they hired a security firm run by former military intelligence agents to spy on pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.
Specifically, Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates reported they have “uncovered evidence that Horus Security Consultancy Limited trawled through student social media feeds and conducted secret counterterror threat assessments on behalf of some of Britain’s most elite institutions,” including the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University College London.
The investigation found that Horus has been paid $594,000 by the universities since 2022, and it has been asked to monitor targets ranging from a Palestinian academic giving a guest lecture at Manchester Metropolitan University to entire groups of pro-Palestinian organizations at the University of Bristol.
Many of the universities implicated in the investigation declined comment. Imperial College London, however, denied that it paid Horus to spy on its students, and said it merely wanted to “help identify potential security risks to its community, which might include protest activity within the vicinity of its campuses.”
This rationale failed to satisfy critics, however.
Gina Romero, the United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, told Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates that “the use of AI to harvest and analyze student data under the guise of open-source intelligence raises profound legal concerns.”
Romero expressed particular concern that Horus is not accountable to any public scrutiny, and that students have no way to know how the data collected from them will be used in the future.
Lizzie Hobbs, a PhD student at the London School of Economics who has taken part in pro-Palestinian protests, said it was “deeply scary” to see universities invest money in surveilling their own students.
“We knew surveillance was happening by the university,” she said, “but it is shocking to see how systematized it is.”
Jo Grady, general secretary for the University and College Union, slammed the schools’ “shameful” actions and said they had “wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds spying on their own students.”
Journalist Mushahid Hussain Sayed also described the universities’ actions as “shameful,” adding that they discriminated “against students and academics on the basis of their peaceful political beliefs/activism in support of Palestine and against Israel!”
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