Twelve British universities – including the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University College London and the London School of Economics – paid a private intelligence firm run by former military officials to monitor the social media accounts of pro-Palestine students and academics, a joint investigation by Al Jazeera and Liberty Investigates has revealed.
Horus Security Consultancy Limited was paid at least £440,000 by universities between January 2022 and March 2025 to compile intelligence reports on student protest activity, conduct secret counter-terrorism threat assessments on invited guest speakers, and provide daily “encampment updates” monitoring student protesters’ online posts.
The UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly described the revelations as raising “profound legal concerns” and said the surveillance had contributed to a “state of terror” among student activists in Britain.
What Horus does – and who runs it
Horus Security Consultancy was established in 2006 as a project within the University of Oxford’s security team by former Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Whiteley, who describes himself as having a “23-year career running security, intelligence and counter-intelligence operations all over the world.”
In 2020, Colonel Tim Collins – the former SAS officer known for a famous eve-of-battle speech during the Iraq War – became a director of the firm’s parent company. Collins features prominently in Horus’s marketing of its services to university security teams.
In recent years, Collins has publicly attributed the rise of pro-Gaza demonstrations in Western countries to a “Russian/Iranian orchestrated media campaign.” He has also called for pro-Palestine protesters “who misbehave” and are not British citizens to be deported from the UK “until they can never come back.”
The firm offers a service called “Insight,” which provides clients with open-source intelligence reports compiled using an AI-integrated tool it has developed to “harvest a vast range of sources on the internet.” Seven of its university clients refused Freedom of Information requests for copies of the briefings, with six arguing that releasing them would undermine Horus’s business model.
The LSE PhD student who found out from journalists
Lizzie Hobbs, a PhD student who took part in LSE’s month-long protest encampment in the summer of 2024, only discovered her social media posts had been flagged to the university when Al Jazeera and Liberty Investigates approached her for comment.
A briefing sent to LSE’s security team on 18 June 2024 contained a post she had written the previous day on X, saying: “We may have been evicted, but we are more powerful and organised as a collective than we have ever been!” Her post was one of thousands from students compiled into daily “encampment updates” and sold to universities for £900 a month.
An email seen by Al Jazeera shows that an LSE security officer forwarded the Horus briefing, which highlighted Hobbs’ post, to colleagues with the comment: “Apparently we were incredibly heavy-handed on the protesters!!”
Students had accused LSE of heavy-handedness after the institution obtained a legal order to evict them from what they described as a non-violent building occupation calling for the university to divest from Israel-linked companies. Hobbs said: “We knew surveillance was happening by the university, but it is shocking to see how systematised it is. It is deeply scary to see how much money universities are willing to invest for this purpose.”
LSE did not respond to requests for comment.
The Palestinian academic subjected to a secret terror assessment
In 2023, Manchester Metropolitan University asked Horus to conduct a secret counter-terrorism “threat assessment” on Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, a 70-year-old Palestinian-American professor of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, who had been invited to give a guest lecture in memory of British student Tom Hurndall, killed by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2003.
Horus provided the university with a six-page report assessing Abdulhadi’s social media use and various allegations made against her by pro-Israel groups. Among the allegations listed were antisemitism claims from 2014 – which were dismissed as meritless by her university and the California state controller – and further allegations from 2017, which a federal judge dismissed as lacking evidence.
Abdulhadi said she was shocked to learn of the assessment: “You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty… but they actually made an assumption of guilt and started investigating me because of my scholarship. What am I supposed to study and teach about to avoid this unwarranted, unfair and unjust scrutiny and surveillance?”
MMU ultimately allowed the lecture to go ahead, concluding there was “no evidence to suggest she has been involved in groups that are proscribed in the UK.” The university said it “routinely undertakes background checks and assessments ahead of events to identify any potential risks.”
Bristol’s “bespoke” protest monitoring service
The University of Bristol has paid at least £8,700 for a “bespoke” alert service from Horus covering “anything related to proposed student protest, encompassing all protest activity across the city” since May 2024. Internal emails show Bristol provided Horus with a list of groups to monitor – including pro-Palestinian and animal rights activists.
A Bristol spokesperson said the firm gathers “publicly available information on any protest activity by any group in the city that could potentially affect the safety of our university community.”
The legal and rights framework
The investigation was triggered by Freedom of Information requests submitted to more than 150 universities. The justification universities have offered for their monitoring of guest speakers rests on the UK government’s Prevent counter-terrorism programme, which requires universities to consider the risk of external speakers expressing extremist views. However, Amnesty International and multiple rights groups have criticised Prevent for disproportionately targeting Muslims and lacking transparency.
Gina Romero, the UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, said: “The use of AI to harvest and analyse student data under the guise of open source intelligence raises profound legal concerns. It allows for disproportionate amounts of data on students to be collected by companies that are free from public scrutiny, and can be used for purposes they cannot foresee.”
She added that the surveillance had contributed to a “state of terror” she had witnessed among UK student activists, with most students she had spoken to experiencing “psychological trauma, mental exhaustion, and burnout,” with many leaving activism altogether.
Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union – the UK’s largest union for university staff – said it was “shameful” that institutions had “wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds spying on their own students.”
The universities that did not respond
The University of Oxford, UCL, King’s College London, the University of Leicester and the University of Nottingham did not respond to requests for comment. Sheffield, Imperial and MMU all denied that their use of Horus constitutes surveillance of individuals, saying it is focused on identifying potential security risks. Horus itself did not respond to multiple requests for comment despite being approached on five separate occasions.
The investigation raises significant questions about the relationship between Britain’s elite universities – institutions whose stated values include academic freedom, free inquiry and the right to peaceful protest – and a private intelligence firm whose senior director has suggested that protest movements are Russian and Iranian propaganda, and that non-British protesters who “misbehave” should be permanently deported.
A report by the European Legal Support Centre, published earlier this year, found that academics and students were more likely to face repression for pro-Palestine views than any other group in Britain. The Horus revelations suggest that some of that repression has been funded, systematised and outsourced to a private company at the cost of nearly half a million pounds of university money.
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