It was a crisp fall day at Johns Hopkins University. Students wearing full backpacks and scarves strolled along “the Beach,” one of the most popular quads on campus. Everything was picture perfect, except for the towering new security cameras dotting the lawn.

The hulking cameras, with attached flashing blue lights and a large, solar-paneled base, have popped up in various outdoor spaces on campus this fall. While the university maintains the cameras, placed where last year’s pro-Palestinian encampment took place, are meant to “keep our community safe,” student activists believe they are used to intimidate and suppress potential protests.

“These additional surveillance towers are obvious and imposing,” said Sophie D’Anieri, an anthropology graduate student at Johns Hopkins and a member of the Teachers and Researchers United union. “They blink and they sound an alarm if you get too close. You can’t walk on campus without being starkly aware that you’re being recorded from all angles.”

Last spring, students at Johns Hopkins, like many other colleges across the country, organized a pro-Palestinian demonstration, where they camped overnight on the Beach and called for Johns Hopkins to divest “from all companies with ties to the state of Israel.” The encampment ended two weeks after it began, with the university agreeing to accelerate a review of its investments, including with fund managers and defense contractors supporting Israeli military actions in Gaza.

“As we’ve seen across the country, universities are targeting and unjustly disciplining pro-Palestinian organizers, through methods of surveillance and more, and bypassing union protections to do so,” said Janvi Madhani, a graduate student studying astrophysics, in a written statement.

Madhani, a representative for the university’s graduate student union, contends that union members who participated in the encampment weren’t notified of their right to have a union steward at disciplinary hearings, and that their contract gives them the right to protest without being surveilled based on their union status.

Doug Donovan, a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins, said that “the university agrees that no one should be targeted for their participation in union activity, and the university does not do this.”

The union remains unconvinced.

“We anticipate that with this new sophisticated surveillance infrastructure, the university will be equipped with the resources to violate our rights more readily,” Madhani said. She said the union is “worried that a university that does not hesitate to bypass union protections in targeting student and worker organizers would not hesitate to share information with private or state law enforcement to put targets on their backs.”

A petition released by the Teachers and Researchers United union earlier this year to “stop militarizing campus” claims that the cameras “use AI to detect people, and Hopkins has provided no information on where our biometric data is going and with whom this surveillance footage is being shared.”

But the university is disputing those claims. Donovan said that “Maryland state law restricts the use of facial recognition technology, and Johns Hopkins follows this law.”

According to a sales rep from LVT, the company that makes the security cameras, the technology does use AI but not facial recognition technology. The camera uses AI technology to determine whether a moving object is a squirrel or a person, for example.

The university is assessing its “long-term camera needs,” Donovan said.

“Camera footage and photographs are reviewed by public safety, law enforcement or other university personnel (such as student affairs or legal counsel) as needed, including in the context of serious student conduct or policy violations,” Donovan continued. “Video footage is stored and automatically overwritten based on the university’s storage capacity, with a target retention period of up to 31 days and extended retention as needed for investigations.”

D’Anieri, the anthropology graduate student, told The Banner that it was “concerning that the only time Hopkins addresses their use of surveillance technology is when they are approached by the media.”

D’Anieri and Madhani also expressed concern that the university was understating the cameras’ capabilities.

The American Association of University Professors’ Johns Hopkins chapter also raised alarm bells about the new cameras. In a letter sent to university leadership, including the Johns Hopkins police chief, François Furstenberg, the secretary of the AAUP, wrote that the cameras had a “chilling” effect on free speech on campus.

“Several faculty members have noted that the installation of these security apparatuses comes at a jarring time, as the university has recommitted itself to values of openness, free expression and intellectual exploration in the wake of campus protests last year,” Furstenberg wrote.

So far, the AAUP said, it hasn’t received a response to the letter, sent on Nov. 1.

It isn’t just the cameras that students have complained about this year. The union said that some of the new protest policies at the university, enacted after the pro-Palestinian encampments, are ways the university can deter activism.

The updated protest policy requires protesters to identify themselves to university staff or risk disciplinary action, and includes a note that Johns Hopkins officials will surveil protesters using security cameras.

“Both the policy changes and surveillance towers were alarming,” said D’Anieri. “This has the effect of scaring students into compliance or risk putting their jobs/degrees on the line.”

The updated policy will deter students from organizing, not just for pro-Palestinian causes, but also for unionization, said D’Anieri, who is a member of the Teachers and Researchers United union.

“The university has a material interest in making it harder for students to organize because the union has won a lot — from increased stipends to better support for international students to important benefits for parents and caregivers,” she said. “We have a great contract and we use protests as one of the tactics to ensure the university adheres to it.”

Donovan stressed that the university “did not make any major changes to policies related to protests and demonstrations.”

“We updated our websites that detail those policies to offer clarifications, explanations and guidance so that there was full transparency around what our existing policies have been,” he said.

He said the university has long required that those who take part in protests and demonstrations provide identification upon request.

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