What the students didn’t know at the time was that the University of Houston had contracted with Dataminr, an artificial intelligence company with a troubling record on constitutional rights, to gather open-source intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. Using an AI tool known as “First Alert,” Dataminr was scraping students’ social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.
This is the first detailed reporting on how a U.S. university used the AI technology to surveil its own students. It’s just one example of how public universities worked with private partners to surveil student protests, revealing how corporate involvement in higher education can be leveraged against students’ free expression.