Letter: 30+ human rights groups demand universities dismantle surveillance & protect free speech

Dear university administrators and trustees,

We are human rights organizations writing to express concerns about campus surveillance tools and policies that have the potential to fuel attacks on free expression and academic freedom across the country. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has launched an aggressive campaign against US academic institutions, revoking international students’ visas and threatening universities with billions of dollars of funding cuts unless they agree to suppress speech on campus. The president of Princeton University has described this assault as “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.” As university leaders take steps to defend their communities, it is imperative that data minimization, data privacy, and the dismantling of harmful surveillance systems are prioritized alongside other protective measures. Without immediate action, surveillance tools and the data they amass will be used to supercharge the virulent attacks on campus communities.

Protest, free speech, academic freedom, and press freedom are indispensable in democracies, and are even more important as fascism looms. University campuses must be spaces where people feel safe to speak truth to power, express dissenting opinions, report freely on campus issues, and organize for social change.

For years, researchers and tech experts have warned about the ways surveillance technologies are fundamentally at odds with the principles of freedom of expression, and democracy broadly. Right now these tools are facilitating the identification and punishment of student protesters, undermining activists’ right to anonymity––a right the Supreme Court has affirmed as vital to free expression and political participation. They are also being used to monitor students’ online activity, forcing students to self-censor and contributing to a broader chilling effect on online speech and journalism.

Beyond stifling free expression, surveillance technologies are often deeply flawed and biased. They disproportionately misidentify people of color, women, children, nonbinary individuals, and people with disabilities—errors that can lead to wrongful disciplinary actions and false arrests. Far from making campuses safer, these tools can bring about serious harm, potentially with life-altering consequences.

Now, in the face of Trump’s attacks on U.S. universities, the stakes of invasive tracking of students have never been higher. The troves of data amassed through surveillance tools can be accessed by agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track, intimidate, and disappear campus community members who have engaged in constitutionally protected speech. These attacks are part and parcel of the administration’s broader campaign to criminalize immigrants and the expression of dissent––a campaign enabled by nationwide surveillance infrastructure.

As university administrators, you have the responsibility to safeguard your campus community and uphold the constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms of students, faculty, and staff––especially in the face of the anti-rights campaign led by the Trump administration. To stand against these threats, we urge you to adopt the following practices:

Refuse to cooperate or share data with law enforcement agencies: Refuse to cooperate with local, state, and federal lawmakers, law enforcement agents, and immigration authorities seeking to surveil, detain, and deport students, faculty, or staff. This includes prohibiting university staff from voluntarily sharing campus community members’ personal data with law enforcement, especially data that can aid in the targeting of activists, like immigration status and records of disciplinary actions. This also includes discontinuing any default data sharing agreements with campus police and local police departments.
Secure data with end-to-end encryption: Secure student, faculty, and staff data with the highest levels of protection, including end-to-end encryption. Mandate training for university staff on data security practices.
Delete sensitive data: Purge any data collected on students, staff, and faculty that is not essential to the functioning of the university––including data that can be used to fuel the targeting of protesters, immigrants, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Delete video footage and photos of campus protesters acquired through surveillance cameras and ID swipe records that identify student and staff movements across campus.
Dismantle surveillance: Discontinue the use of invasive technologies that collect sensitive data. This includes tools and practices such as ID swipe tracking, social media monitoring, facial recognition tools, license plate readers, motion and heat sensors, WiFi vendors that collect people’s location data, and biometric online exam proctoring programs. The data amassed by these tools may be weaponized by local, state, and federal agencies to target activists, immigrants, journalists, and other vulnerable groups on campus.
Reject mask restriction policies: Mask restrictions fundamentally threaten free speech and increase the criminalization of protestors. These policies also jeopardize the safety of the entire campus community by exposing people to the ongoing threats of COVID, Long COVID, and other public health issues. Universities must oppose proposed restrictions on masking, and retain COVID safety policies that allow students to remain masked.
Harm reduction related to doxxing: Provide campus community members with information about data deletion services (i.e. services that remove personal data and other information from data broker databases) and educational resources that allow students, staff, and faculty to proactively protect themselves against doxxing. Also provide tools and services to mitigate harm once doxxing occurs.

Universities must adopt these measures as the baseline for preventing the weaponization of their communities’ data. Universities should also make every possible effort to engage with students, faculty, and staff on enacting broader campus safety measures and demands. This could include the establishment of clear policies delineating how community members are expected to respond to ICE presence on campus, as well as the implementation of strong protections for journalists’ reporting on rights infringements against student/faculty protestors and other vulnerable groups (whether by ICE, administrators, or other actors). It could also include the introduction of secure and privacy-preserving remote learning/teaching options that allow faculty and students to stay at home to protect themselves, among other common sense measures.

Campus surveillance and invasive data collection directly serve the forces seeking to suppress speech and erode the spaces universities provide for political exchange and critical thought. You have the power to resist these threats. In doing so, data minimization, data security, and the dismantling of harmful surveillance systems must take on a central focus. Defending privacy is not only essential for fostering trust within your community, but also for upholding the university’s fundamental role and responsibility to protect free expression and academic freedom––two key pillars of our democracy.

Signed,

18 Million Rising
Access Now
Advocacy for Principled Action in Government
American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC)
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP)
Amnesty International USA
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Security, Race and Rights
Center on Resilience and Digital Justice
COVID Safe Campus
Defending Rights & Dissent
Demand Progress
Dissenters
Ekō
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
Fight for the Future
Free Press
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Kairos
MPower Change
MPower Change Action Fund
Muslim Advocates
Muslim Justice League
New America’s Open Technology Institute
Palestine Legal
Repro Uncensored
Restore The Fourth
Secure Justice
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP)
Tech for Palestine
X-Lab