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

In the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump announced he would be “fighting anti-Semitism” on college campuses by prosecuting and revoking visas for certain students deemed to be “Hamas sympathizers.” In a fact sheet accompanying an executive order with “measures to combat anti-Semitism,” Trump threatens students: “Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” The order itself states that the Department of Education will seek to familiarize institutions of higher education with these goals, so that universities may “monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead … to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove such aliens.” Because participation in pro-Palestine movements is often equated with antisemitism, advocates and journalists like Etan Nechin, a correspondent from Haaretz, were quick to identify this as a move from “a textbook authoritarian playbook meant to stifle any criticism of what’s going on in Israel.”

The order blends Trump’s fascist policies against immigrants and his obsession with mass deportations led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with his commitment to Israeli occupation. And it dovetails seamlessly with the current surveillance networks many universities already have in place after the crackdown on students and community members during the spring 2024 encampments.

Last year’s student-led movement for Palestine prompted a response that revealed the police surveillance technology amassed by campus law enforcement agencies across the United States. The images of militarized police flooding sanctuaries of higher learning and free speech has prompted public outrage. In some places, students and faculty have reiterated a longstanding call to remove cops of all kinds from college campuses. In other communities, activists protesting the occupation of Palestine are calling for universities to divest from Israeli entities, including campus police investments in Israeli surveillance technologies that support occupation at home and abroad.

Today, most universities, and even many community colleges, maintain their own police force, in addition to relying on local city or county police. According to a 2015 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, among public four-year universities with more than 2,500 students, about 95 percent have their own police departments. Among private campuses, the figure is much less, at 38 percent, as funding a police force is expensive. Many campus police have rebranded themselves as softer-sounding “public safety” officers, but their true role remains the same: to protect property and other valuable educational resources, including university investment portfolios.

“When push comes to shove,” Alex Vitale, sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, wrote in The Nation, “campus police are no better than their off-campus counterparts and should be disbanded.” They are a “profound threat” to social justice and exist primarily to protect the neoliberal university.

A History of Campus Policing

Despite the euphemistic rebrand, campus police have a track record of harming the students they are sworn to protect. In 2017, campus police fatally shot a nonbinary Georgia Tech student. Campus police killed a 19-year-old student in the lobby of a dorm at Liberty University in 2019. In 2012, campus police shot and killed a California State University, San Bernardino student.

This apparatus seeks to police the borders of the ivory tower, but the violence inherent to modern policing often spills over to impact community members unaffiliated with universities as well. For example, in 2018, Portland State University (PSU) police shot and killed Jason Washington, a 45-year-old man from the community who was trying to break up a fight. In 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer fatally shot unarmed 43-year-old Sam DuBose during a traffic stop.

Students and community activists have been diligently trying to limit the power of campus police forces. Following the Portland State murder, students renewed a #DisarmPSU campaign which first began when the university board voted to give guns to the campus police four years earlier.

In April 2018, after University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers shot 21-year-old student Charles Thomas, students and community members launched a #CareNotCops campaign. UCPD is one of the largest private police forces in the country, with approximately 100 officers and an annual budget, student newspaper Chicago Maroon reported, of $5.5 million. The University of Chicago butts up against Chicago’s majority-Black South Side, and the UCPD strictly police the border.

Community organizations Black Lives Matter Chicago and Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100) joined in the 2018 protests. The University of Chicago, like other local institutions of higher education, “are not only complicit, but are active stakeholders in the mass-incarceration, over-policing, displacement and overall harm of Black and Brown communities” explained BYP 100. Organizers were calling for, among other things, the “disarming of UCPD officers and reduction of their budget.”

Deadly Exchanges

Police militarization has been further accelerated by more than two decades of “training expeditions” in which thousands of U.S. police have traveled to learn from Israeli police and military who enforce an occupation of Palestinians with the aid of high-tech surveillance technology. Such trips are also an opportunity for Israeli-based companies to sell their surveillance products. These include the ironically named Nice Systems, which provides camera networks; SuperCom, which deals in electronic monitoring; and Cellebrite, which specializes in phone-hacking technology and has sold its products to agencies in at least 20 states. This influence is detailed by author Antony Loewenstein in his influential text The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. He writes that Israel engages in the surveillance of all Palestinians en masse, “regardless of age, location, or intent.”

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a test case for the militarization of campus police.

A report from Deadly Exchange, a campaign launched by Jewish Voice for Peace, details how such exchanges “expose US law enforcement to the comprehensive monitoring and infiltration tactics and technologies in the Israeli arsenal, modeling the apparatus of a sweeping surveillance state.”

Some universities in the U.S. are also complicit in these trainings, such as the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program based at Georgia State University, where Israeli police are invited to train U.S. law enforcement from major U.S. cities. Activists have called for ending the GILEE program, sponsored in part by the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit behind the large police training facility south of the city known as “Cop City.”

In 2019, Wayne State University’s chief of police traveled to Israel “to share law enforcement strategies” as part of a “delegation” of other police officers visiting from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. He noted the importance of the university police’s jurisdiction, “not only [on] campus, but also [in] the greater Midtown Detroit area — all neighbors and members of our community.”

As police try to legitimize their growing repression, communities continue to resist. In 2020, Tufts University students voted in a referendum to prohibit campus police from attending future retreats in Israel. Amnesty International noted that funds spent “to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us,” explaining that many domestic police abuses documented parallel “violations by Israeli military, security and police officials.”

Spying From the Ivory Tower

During the wave of pro-Palestine encampments that swept the country last spring, campus police took the opportunity to amplify traditional strong-arm behaviors (which included numerous violent assaults against professors and students alike) with newly acquired surveillance technology. This dangerous combination led to more than 3,200 arrests nationwide.

Universities supported these efforts by quickly suspending First Amendment rights to peaceable assembly, with some even enforcing archaic anti-mask laws against student protesters (originally enacted in response to the Ku Klux Klan) to aid police use of facial recognition software.

The student newspaper Columbia Spectator exposed in September how the administration at Columbia University and Barnard College spied on student activists before and after the encampments. Following a “Resistance 101” workshop held by a campus divestment group earlier in the spring, campus police started collecting information on demonstrators, gathering footage from campus surveillance cameras and tracking student IDs swiped at building entrances. They also sent private investigators to interrogate students at home, Columbia Spectator reports. The administration then began to suspend students, expel them from housing and call them before disciplinary hearings. New York City Police Department (NYPD) conducted multiple sweeps of student spaces.

In a press conference on May 1, during the height of the campus protests, New York City Mayor Eric Adams thanked Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who joined him onstage, for “monitoring the situation” when protests first began across the city. Professor Weiner, who conveniently moonlights as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, serves as the liaison between NYPD’s Tel Aviv branch (built in 2012 on the rubble of the destroyed Palestinian village Kfar Saba) and NYPD stateside. Weiner boasted that her office in New York had received “hourly updates” from the NYPD’s Tel Aviv precinct since October 7, ensuring that the militarized army terrorizing Palestinians was aligned with those harming U.S. students.

At Yale University, the 93-officer private police department kept an eye on campus protests with help from the FBI. As journalist Theia Chatelle reported in Jewish Currents, documents obtained from the settlement in a lawsuit for public records revealed that Jennifer Wagner, the head of the FBI’s New Haven office, reached out to Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell to offer assistance: “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests related to the Israel/Hamas conflict at several colleges and universities.” After an alleged assault in April, the FBI got a search warrant for the home of a pro-Palestine student and performed what Yale Public Safety referred to as a “dump” of information from their cell phone, a serious invasion of their personal property. The Yale Police Department “installed cameras on campus, tracked students’ social media accounts and monitored students using aerial drones,” according to Chatelle.

The university recently won a federal grant of nearly $1 million to establish a Real Time Crime Center that will allow police to monitor surveillance cameras, search databases and use license plate readers.

These invasions of privacy preceded a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the FBI and other federal agencies in July 2024 over their history of targeting activists and communities of color “for unwarranted surveillance under the false guise of national security.” Yale Police Department’s surveillance of pro-Palestinian protesters last spring also led to the Yale College Council voting just last month to establish a new oversight committee for the Yale Police Department.

Israeli Tech on Campus

One of the nation’s largest public universities, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has taken a particularly aggressive approach to targeting activists. It’s currently pursuing felony mob-action charges against encampment demonstrators, using evidence from license plate readers and monitoring social media posts. UIUC is a test case for the militarization of campus police. The University of Illinois Police Department (UIPD) had a total budget in fiscal year 2022-2023 of $13.5 million. There are currently 2,300 cameras installed throughout the campus. The university recently won a federal grant of nearly $1 million to establish a Real Time Crime Center that will allow police to monitor surveillance cameras, search databases and use license plate readers.

Information obtained from public records requests reveal the capabilities of UIPD’s surveillance: In one instance, a detective with the UIPD sent photos of a student protester to the Illinois State Police Statewide Terrorism & Intelligence Center, a fusion center opened on May 14, 2003. Photos from UIPD were run through facial recognition software possessed by the fusion center to successfully identify the student, leading to their prosecution.

Campus and community activists have found that since at least 2021, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees has contracted with Cellebrite, the Israeli-based company that sells surveillance technology and is known for being the phone-hacking software of choice for the FBI. The board most recently renewed its contract with the tech firm in November 2024, for use of “Digital Collector” and “Inspector” subscriptions. The former is advertised as a “must-have tool in the digital forensic toolbox … for investigators,” while the latter is marketed to find “Internet History, Downloads, Locations, Recent searches, and more.” The board has spent at least $17,464.40 on such technology, according to information obtained from Illinois Freedom of Information Act requests.

UIUC’s contract renewal comes after more than a year of Palestinian ethnic cleansing by Israel, and underscores the university administration’s commitment to Israeli interests in direct opposition to the concerns of student, alumni, faculty and community activists. Students have been trying to pass boycott, divestment, sanctions referenda at UIUC since at least 2020, to no avail. Lauren Knutsen, a concerned alumni who recently spoke out in favor of divestment at the quarterly board meeting, feels like this contract renewal is a slap in the face to student activists after everything that has gone on over the last year. She told Truthout that even though students have been asking their university to listen, and “they just continue to be ignored.”

The university is now a repeat customer of a company that has been accused of facilitating human rights abuses by activists for years, including by Amnesty International. Cellebrite has academic institutions like UIUC to thank for an “excellent 2024” in which Cellebrite “exceeded [their] original revenue” and other financial targets, according to interim CEO Thomas E. Hogan. The New York Times reported that Cellebrite has sold about $54 million in “investigative tools” to ICE which can now be used to power Trump’s current immigration crackdown.

Partnering with Cellebrite is one weapon in UIUC’s arsenal to stifle student speech on campus, a pattern of behavior that caused the ACLU of Illinois to issue a scathing letter on January 14, 2025, directly to university administrators. The letter stated among other things that UIUC needed to exercise “greater restraint in enforcing policies restricting student activism.”

When asked to comment, UIUC Executive Communications and Issue Management Director Pat Wade claimed that campus police do “not use Cellebrite technology for surveillance,” and only use the program for “cellular device extraction and analysis” with consent or a warrant. He also asserted that the university “remains committed to creating an environment that fosters free speech.”

Truthout reached out to Cellebrite, but they failed to respond with a comment.

Sana Saboowala, a member of the Champaign-Urbana Muslim Action Committee and a Ph.D. candidate at UIUC, helped expose this UIUC-Cellebrite connection. As she told Truthout, “The FBI and ICE have paid millions of dollars to Cellebrite, which is run by former IDF members, and now these military tools are in the hands of corrupt regimes, ICE and our campus police. It is unacceptable.” The Muslim Action Committee was concerned, Saboowala says, because “historically Muslims have suffered from mass surveillance in this country, so therefore our ongoing investment in surveillance technology at every level — from campus, to local police, to the federal government — is a concern for the Muslim community.”

Kathryn Clancy, a UIUC professor and member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, is disturbed by the university’s decision to “make it impossible for students to participate safely in protest.” In her view, an important part of a university education is “the cultivation of bravery, of standing up for something you believe in.” In the end, the response to the spring encampment illustrates “that campuses care more about their property than their students.”