From a statewide counterterrorism surveillance and intelligence-sharing hub in Ohio, a warning went out to administrators at the Ohio State University: “Currently, we are aware of a demonstration that is planned to take place at Ohio State University this evening (4/25/2024) at 1700 hours. Please see the attached flyers. It is possible that similar events will occur on campuses across Ohio in the coming days.” Founded in the wake of 9/11 to facilitate information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, fusion centers like Ohio’s Statewide Terrorism Analysis and Crime Center, or STACC, have become yet another way for law enforcement agencies to surveil legally protected First Amendment activities. The 80 fusion centers across the U.S. work with the military, private sector, and other stakeholders to collect vast amounts of information on American citizens in a stated effort to prevent future terror attacks. ## Most Read Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money, Police Say Amanda Moore Don’t Let Larry Summers Back Into Polite Society Dylan Gyauch-Lewis War in Venezuela, Brought to You By the Same People Who Lied Us Into Iraq Alain Stephens In Ohio, it seemed that the counterterrorism surveillance hub was also keeping close tabs on campus events. It wasn’t just at Ohio State: An investigative series by The Intercept has found that fusion centers were actively involved in monitoring pro-Palestine demonstrations on at least five campuses across the country, as shown in more than 20,000 pages of documents obtained via public records requests exposing U.S. universities’ playbooks for cracking down on pro-Palestine student activism. ## Related ### How California Spent Natural Disaster Funds to Quell Student Protests for Palestine As the documents make clear, not only did universities view the peaceful, student-led demonstrations as a security issue — warranting the outside police and technological surveillance interventions detailed in the rest of this series — but the network of law enforcement bodies responsible for counterterror surveillance operations framed the demonstrations in the same way. After the Ohio fusion center’s tip-off to the upcoming demonstration, officials in the Ohio State University Police Department worked quickly to assemble an operations plan and shut down the demonstration. “The preferred course of action for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass and other building violations will be arrest and removal from the event space,” wrote then-campus chief of police Kimberly Spears-McNatt in an email to her officers just two hours after the initial warning from Ohio’s primary fusion center. OSUPD and the Ohio State Highway Patrol would go on to clear the encampment that same night, arresting 36 demonstrators. Fusion centers were designed to facilitate the sharing of already collected intelligence between local, state, and federal agencies, but they have been used to target communities of color and to ever-widen the gray area of allowable surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has long advocated against the country’s fusion center network, on the grounds that they conducted overreaching surveillance of activists from the Black Lives Matter movement to environmental activism in Oregon. “Ohio State has an unwavering commitment to freedom of speech and expression. We do not discuss our security protocols in detail,” a spokesperson for Ohio State said in a statement to The Intercept. Officials at STACC didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The proliferation of fusion centers has contributed to a scope creep that allows broader and more intricate mass surveillance, said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Between AI assessments of online speech, the swirl of reckless data sharing from fusion centers, and often opaque campus policies, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Mir said. ## We’re independent of corporate interests — and powered by members. Join us. Become a member ## Join Our Newsletter Thank You For Joining! Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept? I'm in Become a member By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. ## Join Our Newsletter ## Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in While the Trump administration has publicized its weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against pro-Palestine protesters — with high-profile attacks including attempts to illegally deport student activists — the documents obtained by The Intercept display its precedent under the Biden administration, when surveillance and repression were coordinated behind the scenes. “ All of that was happening under Biden,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, “and what we’ve seen with the Trump administration’s implementation of Project 2025 and Project Esther is really just an acceleration of all of these tools of repression that were in place from before.” Not only was the groundwork for the Trump administration’s descent into increasingly repressive and illegal tactics laid under Biden, but the investigation revealed that the framework for cracking down on student free speech was also in place before the pro-Palestine encampments. Among other documentation, The Intercept __ obtained a copy of Clemson University Police Department’s 2023 Risk Analysis Report, which states: “CUPD participates in regular information and intelligence sharing and assessment with both federal and state partners and receives briefings and updates throughout the year and for specific events/incidents form [sic] the South Carolina Information and Intelligence Center (SCIIC)” — another fusion center. The normalization of intelligence sharing between campus police departments and federal law enforcement agencies is widespread across U.S. universities, and as pro-Palestine demonstrations escalated across the country in 2024, U.S. universities would lean on their relationships with outside agencies and on intelligence sharing arrangements with not only other universities, but also the state and federal surveillance apparatus. Read our complete coverage ## Chilling Dissent OSU was not the only university where fusion centers facilitated briefings, intelligence sharing, and, in some cases, directly involved federal law enforcement agencies. At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, where the state tapped funds set aside for natural disasters and major emergencies to pay outside law enforcement officers to clear an occupied building, the university president noted that the partnership would allow them “to gather support from the local Fusion Center to assist with investigative measures.” Cal Poly Humboldt had already made students’ devices a target for their surveillance, as then-President Tom Jackson confirmed in an email. The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall,” a university building that students occupied for eight days, Jackson wrote. With the help of the FBI – and warrants for the search and seizure of devices – the university could go a step further in punishing the involved students. > The university’s IT department had “tracked the IP and account user information for all individuals connecting to WiFi in Siemens Hall.” In one email exchange, Kyle Winn, a special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco Division, wrote to a sergeant at the university’s police department: “Per our conversation, attached are several different warrants sworn out containing language pertaining to electronic devices. Please utilize them as needed. See you guys next week.” Cal Poly Humboldt said in a statement to The Intercept that it “remains firmly committed to upholding the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, ensuring that all members of our community can speak, assemble, and express their views.” “The pro-Palestine movement really does face a crisis of repression,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow. “We are up against repressive forces that have always been there, but have never been this advanced. So it’s really important that we don’t underestimate them — the repressive forces that are arrayed against us.” ## Related ### How Northern California’s Police Intelligence Center Tracked Protests In Mir’s view, university administrators should have been wary about unleashing federal surveillance at their schools due to fusion centers’ reputation for infringing on civil rights. “Fusion centers have also come under fire for sharing dubious intelligence and escalating local police responses to BLM,” Mir said, referring to the Black Lives Matter protests. “For universities to knowingly coordinate and feed more information into these systems to target students puts them in harm’s way and is a threat to their civil rights.” _Research support provided by the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations._ Share * Copy link * Share on Facebook * Share on Bluesky * Share on X * Share on LinkedIn * Share on WhatsApp _IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._ What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. This is not hyperbole. Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation. Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy. ## We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us? $15 $25 $50 $100 $5 $8 $10 $15 One Time Monthly Donate ## Contact the author: Theia Chatelle @theiachatelle on X ## Related ### Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists’ Instagram Account Info With Feds ### A Bomb Threat Targeted Student Protesters. So Why Did They Get Blamed for It? ### In No Labels Call, Josh Gottheimer, Mike Lawler, and University Trustees Agree: FBI Should Investigate Campus Protests ### The Defund Police Movement Takes Aim at Fusion Centers and Mass Surveillance ## Latest Stories The Intercept Briefing ### Robert Reich Thinks Democrats Are On the Brink of a New Era The Intercept Briefing - 6:00 am The professor, author, and longtime commentator on the economy and Democrats under Trump. ### At 17, She Gave Up Her Son. Sixty Years Later, She Found Him on Death Row. Liliana Segura - Nov. 20 Richard Randolph, now Malik Abdul-Sajjad, is scheduled to die tonight. His biological mother will never get a chance to meet him. ### Rubio Says Maduro is Terrorist-in-Chief of Venezuela’s “Cártel de los Soles.” Is It Even a Real Group? Noah Hurowitz - Nov. 20 The Trump administration’s push for war on Venezuela includes alleging Maduro controls a government-run “narcoterrorist” conspiracy. Join The Conversation

A documentary featuring mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank. YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. > “YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes.” The Palestinian groups’ YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians. “I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.” ## Most Read ICE Plans Cash Rewards for Private Bounty Hunters to Locate and Track Immigrants Sam Biddle Man Jailed for Facebook Meme Is Freed in Tennessee Liliana Segura Inside the World of Leftist Gun Nuts Alain Stephens After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants and charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant with war crimes in Gaza, the Trump administration escalated its defense of Israel’s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court. “It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Congress did not intend to allow the president to cut off the flow of information to the American public and the world — instead, information, including documents and videos, are specifically exempted under the statute that the president cited as his authority for issuing the ICC sanctions.” ## **“Alarming Setback** ” YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes. Read our complete coverage ## Chilling Dissent “Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws,” YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement. According to Google’s Sanctions Compliance publisher policy, “Google publisher products are not eligible for any entities or individuals that are restricted under applicable trade sanctions and export compliance laws.” Al Mezan, a human rights organization in Gaza, told The Intercept that its YouTube channel was abruptly terminated this year on October 7 without prior notification. “Terminating the channel deprives us from reaching what we aspire to convey our message to, and fulfill our mission,” a spokesperson for the group said, “and prevents us from achieving our goals and limits our ability to reach the audience we aspire to share our message with.” The West Bank-based Al-Haq’s channel was deleted on October 3, a spokesperson for the group said, with a message from YouTube that its “content violates our guidelines.” “YouTube’s removal of a human rights organisation’s platform, carried out without prior warning, represents a serious failure of principle and an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression,” the Al-Haq spokesperson said in a statement. “The U.S. Sanctions are being used to cripple accountability work on Palestine and silence Palestinian voices and victims, and this has a ripple effect on such platforms also acting under such measures to further silence Palestinian voices.” > “By doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims.” The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which the UN describes as the oldest human rights organization in Gaza, said in a statement that YouTube’s move “protects perpetrators from accountability.” “YouTube’s decision to close PCHR’s account is basically one of many consequences that we as an organisation have faced since the decision of the US government to sanction our organisations for our legitimate work,” said Basel al-Sourani, an international advocacy officer and legal advisor for the group. “YouTube said that we were not following their policy on Community Guidelines, when all our work was basically presenting factual and evidence-based reporting on the crimes committed against the Palestinian people especially since the start of the ongoing genocide on 7 October.” “By doing this, YouTube is being complicit in silencing the voices of Palestinian victims,” al-Sourani added. ## Looking Outside U.S. The three human rights groups’ account terminations cumulatively amount to the erasure of more than 700 videos. The deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like The Beach, about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike. Some videos are still available through copies saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or on alternate platforms, such as Facebook and Vimeo. The wiping only affected the group’s official channels; videos which were produced by the nonprofits but hosted on alternate YouTube channels remain active. No cumulative index of videos deleted by YouTube is available, however, and many appear to not be available elsewhere online. Videos posted elsewhere online, the groups fear, could soon be targeted for deletion because many of the platforms hosting them are also U.S.-based services. The ICC itself began exploring using service providers outside the U.S. Al-Haq said it would also be looking for alternatives outside of U.S. companies to host their work. YouTube isn’t the only U.S. tech company blocking Palestinian rights groups from using its services. The Al-Haq spokesperson said Mailchimp, the mailing list service, also deleted the group’s account in September. (Mailchimp and its parent company, Intuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) ## **Caving to Trump’s Demand** Both the U.S. and Israeli governments have long shielded themselves from the ICC and accountability for their alleged war crimes. Neither country is party to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that established the court. In November 2024, the ICC prosecutors issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, charging the leaders with intentionally starving civilians by blocking aid from entering into Gaza. Both the Biden and Trump administrations rejected the legitimacy of the warrants. ## Related ### Netanyahu Is Blowing Up the Gaza Ceasefire — and Trump Is the One Losing Face Since his re-election, Trump has taken a more aggressive posture against accountability for Israel. In the early days of his second term, Trump renewed sanctions against the ICC and issued new, more severe measures against court officials and anyone accused of aiding their efforts. In September, in a new order, he specifically sanctioned the three Palestinian groups. The U.S. moves followed Israel’s own designation of Al-Haq as a “terrorist organization” in 2021 and an online smear campaign by pro-Israeli activists attempting to link Palestinian Centre for Human Rights with militant groups. The sanctions freeze the organizations’ assets in the U.S. and bar sanctioned individuals from traveling to the country. Federal judges have already issued preliminary injunctions in two cases in favor of plaintiffs who argued the sanctions had violated their First Amendment rights. “The Trump administration is focused on contributing to the censorship of information about Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the sanctions against these organizations is very deliberately designed to make association with these organizations frightening to Americans who will be concerned about material support laws,” said Whitson, of DAWN, which joined a coalition of groups in September to demand the Trump administration drop its sanctions. Like many tech firms, YouTube has shown a ready willingness to comply with demands from both the Trump administration and Israel. YouTube coordinated with a campaign organized by Israeli tech workers to remove social media content deemed critical of Israel. At home, Google, YouTube’s parent company, secretly handed over personal Gmail account information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to detain a pro-Palestinian student organizer. Even before Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, YouTube had been accused of unevenly applying its community guidelines to censor Palestinian voices while withholding similar scrutiny from pro-Israeli content. Such trends continued during the war, according to a Wired report. Earlier this year, YouTube shut down the official account of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. The move came after pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel, which wrote to YouTube to point out that the organization had been sanctioned by the State Department. Whitson warned that YouTube’s capitulation could set a precedent, pushing other tech companies to bend to censorship. “They are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience,” she said. “It’s not going to end with Palestine.” Share * Copy link * Share on Facebook * Share on Bluesky * Share on X * Share on LinkedIn * Share on WhatsApp _IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._ What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. This is not hyperbole. Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation. Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy. ## We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us? $15 $25 $50 $100 $5 $8 $10 $15 One Time Monthly Donate ## Contact the author: Nikita Mazurov Jonah Valdez [email protected] @jonahmv.05 on Signal @jonahmv on X ## Related ### Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist ### Trump Sanctions Palestinian Human Rights Groups for Doing Their Job. Anybody Could Be Next. ### New U.S. Report on Israel’s Human Rights Abuses Is 91 Percent Shorter ### Google Worried It Couldn’t Control How Israel Uses Project Nimbus, Files Reveal ## Latest Stories Voices ### Dick Cheney Doesn’t Deserve Your Heartfelt Eulogies Eoin Higgins - 1:14 pm The former vice president died Monday night. Now is not the time to whitewash his bloody legacy of war and destruction. Chilling Dissent ### Are You on Trump’s List of Domestic Terrorists? There’s No Way to Know. Nick Turse - 10:39 am The Trump administration is using NSPM-7 to compile the names of alleged domestic terror groups. It won’t tell us who’s on the list. Voices ### From Gaza to Sudan: “Their Pain Is Ours” Lina Ghassan Abu Zayed - Nov. 3 The unfolding tragedy in Sudan reminds us in Gaza that wars, hunger, and destruction are not isolated events. Join The Conversation

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