Documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 on 12 February 2025 reveal that the ANU’s management had conducted social media analysis of ANUSA’s online Annual General Meeting held on May 8, which largely revolved around discussion of the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment.
The email correspondence was disclosed in response to a request for emails “regarding the identity of students, tracking students, creating profiles on students, engaging third-party companies to find out about students, compiling a list of students, or any email that identifies student identities; at, or affiliated with the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment”.
In the released emails, Lucas Owen, ANU Security Operations Manager, addresses Deputy Vice-Chancellor Grady Venville with a redacted attachment, saying “This list is by no means complete and is a work in progress.”
The email chain also bears reference to “consideration and review in the Gallagher Access Control system.” Gallagher provides the security access system to rooms and buildings across the ANU Campus, which is marketed as enabling its consumers “to monitor where, when, and why people are there at all times”.
Woroni reached out to the ANU BIPOC Department for comment.
In response to the emails obtained, ANUSA BIPOC officer Aleesya Amirizal (she/ her) told Woroni:
“ANU BIPOC department severely condemns the very plausible chance that ANU has been putting funds towards monitoring the activity of students involved in the encampment.”
She continued, “It would be a complete invasion of privacy for them to be monitoring which building students are coming in and out of especially considering that the majority, or a large volume, of the students involved in the encampment, were people of colour.”
On the alleged monitoring of student social media Aleesya said, “the fact that they took advantage of the AGM, which is meant to be an open voting system – people had their faces [showing] on Zoom – is again taking advantage of democracy.”
The ANU has previously refused to comment directly on whether Pro-Palestinian students were monitored.
When asked by Senator Faruqi at a Senate Estimates Committee hearing in November last year about whether ANU engaged any consultants or private investigators to monitor students’ social media, Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell instead stated that the ANU “[has] a broad range of activities that we enact around security.”
When asked about the emails, and again about whether the ANU’s range of security tools and expertise includes the engagement of consultants or private investigators to monitor student’s activity online, or their movement on campus, an ANU spokesperson told Woroni, “As the Vice-Chancellor has previously said, the University has a broad range of activities that we enact around security, and we take the security of our students seriously.”
Woroni will continue to report as the story develops.
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