Surveillance and Education
The Wake may be watching, but so is the government
Carina Dieringer
You are being watched.
Your behavior, your beliefs, your social media activity. Even when you are in the classroom, your activity is being monitored.
Kale Fajardo, associate professor of Asian American studies and director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, first discovered the true extent of this in 2023. Months after Israel began committing its ongoing genocide in Gaza, Fajardo typed his name into a search engine and confirmed his suspicion that he had been uploaded to right-wing organization Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist.
The website states its intention is “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Eight University of Minnesota professors are on the list. Fajardo said TPUSA targeted him specifically because his studies in Asian American and Filipinx masculinity are inclusive of transgender people. His profile picture and information were lifted from the Center for Applied Transgender Studies, where he is a senior fellow.
“I do think it’s sort of an attempt to harass, intimidate, and silence,” Fajardo said. “And that can have a chilling effect.”
Fajardo compared the experience to many things he witnessed in his personal life: the dehumanization of gay men during the AIDS crisis, the whispering consequences of dictatorship in the Philippines, the creeping horror of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Surveillance of scholars like him is part of a larger far-right attack on transgender people and inclusive education, he said.
American Studies Department Chair Miranda Joseph encouraged Fajardo to avoid campus when the TPUSA “American Comeback Tour” hosted an event at Northrop on Sep. 22. Fajardo has not been contacted by President Rebecca Cunningham or any University Deans about the list.
As of Nov. 11, Fajardo has not received backlash for being on the list. Although he does not stay awake at night worrying about his place on the watchlist, he is concerned that he might not receive adequate protection from the University if something were to happen.
On a list he sits. And on a list he waits.
This targeting is not limited to professors. Kyle Feldhake, member of the University of Minnesota’s Students for a Democratic Society, is featured on the pro-Israel site Canary Mission. In July, a senior US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer testified in a Boston federal court that ICE used information from Canary Mission to find and deport pro-Palestine protestors. This led to the March arrest of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk.
Canary Mission added Feldhake to the list for being one of 11 protestors who was arrested after occupying Morrill Hall in October 2024. The occupation was planned by SDS to demand the University divest from Israeli companies, including weapons and defense companies. Feldhake said the University has wasted resources on surveillance by paying notable administrators such as Calvin Phillips, the vice president of student affairs, to sit and observe SDS protests.
Police use technology to make observance possible on a larger scale. In 2023, the city of Minneapolis began a 3-year $500,000 contract with Zencity, an Israeli company that monitors social media and conducts surveys in order to gauge community support for the Minneapolis Police Department.
Cut the Contract, a campaign within the Free Palestine Coalition that Feldhake organizes with, has criticized the partnership for its exclusion of those who do not have tech access, public opinion reports that are biased towards highly emotionally charged content on social media, and connection to the Israel Defense Forces. The CEO of Zencity served along with other staff in Unit 8200, an IDF unit that uses tech and AI to spy on Palestinians and identify people as targets for military strikes.
“A lot of people just kind of inherently don’t see all the surveillance and all of the tracking as problematic,” Feldhake said. “People have a lot of confidence in institutions to kind of believe that they’re well-intentioned and not doing anything sinister with all this data and surveillance infrastructure."
According to Clarence Okoh, human rights attorney and co-founder of the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition, predictive policing is not just a fantasy invented in the 2002 film “Minority Report.” Drones and cameras are used in schools and cities across the country to “predict” who will commit a crime before it occurs. The technology targets Black and Indigenous youth at a disproportionate rate.
In high schools, this predictive technology is being implemented before it can be truly studied. Okoh said issues that are traditionally resolved by social workers, community, and family connection are made worse when these systems are in use.
“I don't think that we need to look for alternatives to surveillance,” Okoh said. “I think the real challenge is, how do we stop treating surveillance as the alternative, as the go-to solution for every single social problem?”
Okoh and Marika Pfefferkorn, Minnesota educator and activist, founded the NOTICE Coalition after meeting at a Data 4 Public Good Conference and trading stories about surveillance of youth in their local communities. For Okoh this was Pasco, Florida. For Pfefferkorn it was the Twin Cities. The two organized as a response to a technological shift in the school-to-prison pipeline, a phenomenon in which predominantly Black youth end up incarcerated due to policies and lack of resources within public education systems.
In 2018, St. Paul Public Schools, the city of St. Paul, and Ramsey County entered into a Joint Powers Agreement which would allow them to share student data with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for researching criminal likelihood. Data points that were used to identify this included receiving free and reduced lunch, having family members with a criminal record, history of suspension, and low attendance records. This came directly after the Minnesota Department of Human Rights revealed that 43 Minnesota school districts were suspending Black, Indigenous, and disabled students at a much higher rate than other students.
After the announcement of the SPPS proposal in 2013, Pfefferkorn began working on educating community members, who often were not previously aware of the implications of the technology. She hosted community learning spaces to encourage people to take the issue into their own hands. Algorithmic Improv and Dare to Data workshops helped community members understand the technology through the context of their own lives.
Pfefferkorn said that most people she talked to fell into a category that would have deemed them more likely to be a criminal. One young student called Pfefferkorn after realizing that her past family struggles would have labelled her a probable criminal according to the school’s rubric.
“Nobody,” Pfefferkorn recounted the student saying, “gets to determine my future but myself.”
One form of school surveillance that is gaining popularity is vape detection technologies. These come in the forms of sensors and audio technology, which are placed in school bathrooms and locker rooms.
Pfefferkorn said that there is no solution provided for students that are identified as likely to be a criminal through these technologies.
“When young people are caught with the vape detection technologies,” Pfefferkorn said, “they're dismissed. They go home. There's not a redress of what's happening.”
This has legal and ethical implications. Many of these systems are implemented without concern for legality, Okoh said.
As an attorney, Okoh worked on challenging a predictive policing system in Pasco. He said that after advocacy and legal work from the community, the U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the system was a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In a separate case in 2021, a federal appeals court ruled that a drone surveillance system which photographed 90% of Baltimore for 12 hours a day was a violation of the 4th amendment.
“A lot of people feel like we've already lost the fight, and that this technological surge is inevitable,” Okoh said. “And I challenge that wholeheartedly.”
According to Feldhake, many people are desensitized to surveillance and intimidated by the idea of taking on tech corporations who hold leverage within the government. He encourages people to be conscientious about social media use and to understand that AI data scraping means any social media post or message can be used as police data.
“If the country continues to go down an authoritarian path,” Feldhake said, “The infrastructure is in place. And the current institutions aren’t really resisting it in a whole lot of meaningful ways.”
For Fajardo, resistance is as simple as continuing to do the work that inspired him to attend graduate school and write a dissertation.
“Remember that the generations that are coming into our classrooms—they’re also hungry for it,” Fajardo said. “They want to know this information.”
Looking away won’t help: the only way to fight surveillance is to return its gaze.