Fight for the Future and coalition campaign to ban surveillance in US schools and campuses (2020–ongoing)

Fight for the Future's campaign to ban facial recognition and surveillance technologies from US K-12 schools and university campuses is the longest-running US civil-society mobilization focused specifically on AI and biometric surveillance in educational settings, and the only one to have secured a permanent state-level prohibition on facial recognition in schools. Launched in January 2020 — building directly on the July 2019 Ban Facial Recognition parent campaign — the effort has combined mass online petition mobilization, coalition open letters, student organizer toolkits, and targeted legislative advocacy to produce the New York State Biometric Identifying Technology in Schools Act (2020) and the 2023 permanent prohibition issued by the New York State Education Department. By 2025 the campaign had extended its frame from facial recognition specifically to a broader indictment of campus surveillance infrastructure, responding to documented use of university data systems to identify and target political protesters and international students under the Trump administration.

Background: the Lockport flashpoint and the schools track's origin

The campaign's proximate trigger was the Lockport City School District in western New York, which in late 2019 activated a facial recognition system — supplied by SN Technologies, using the company's AEGIS platform — to scan the faces of students, staff, and visitors against a watch list of persons of interest. Lockport's deployment was among the first K-12 school facial recognition activations in the United States and drew sustained advocacy scrutiny: a system trained on a database not representative of the students being screened was deployed in a setting where targets of identification could not meaningfully consent or opt out; the watch list criteria and operational parameters were not publicly disclosed; and the New York State Education Department's cybersecurity regulations had not explicitly authorised biometric data collection of this kind. The New York Civil Liberties Union began pressing Albany for a state prohibition following the Lockport activation.

The broader context was Fight for the Future's July 2019 launch of banfacialrecognition.com, which called for an outright moratorium on government use of facial recognition across all sectors and drew more than 40 organizational endorsements. The schools campaign began as a sector-specific application of that broader moratorium demand, adding the particular vulnerabilities of educational settings — the coercive nature of institutional enrolment, the presence of minors, the absence of opt-out options, and the chilling effects on academic freedom and peer political expression — to the general case against government facial recognition.

The January–February 2020 campaign launch

On 14 January 2020, Fight for the Future and Students for Sensible Drug Policy jointly announced a nationwide campaign to stop facial recognition on college campuses, launching campus.banfacialrecognition.com as a dedicated microsite providing student groups with a toolkit for organizing resolutions at their universities. The campaign coordinated a national day of action targeting more than 40 major universities, with student groups at George Washington University and DePaul University among the first to file resolutions. The campus microsite included a scorecard tracking which universities had committed to non-use, which were considering deployment, and which had already activated facial recognition systems.

On 13 February 2020, more than 40 civil society organisations published an open letter to school and university administrators demanding commitments against facial recognition deployment. The signatories included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU and NYCLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Color of Change, Demand Progress, the Muslim Justice League, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Immigration Law Center, and United We Dream — a coalition drawn deliberately from digital rights, civil liberties, Muslim community, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ organisations. The coalition framing made the campaign's harm theory explicit: the populations facing disproportionate harm from facial recognition misidentification were the same populations already facing structural exclusion from civil institutions, and the educational setting was a site where the two converged without the formal accountability mechanisms present in other deployment contexts. Harvard, Columbia, the University of Michigan, Oberlin College, and UCLA subsequently issued public non-use commitments.

The New York State moratorium (2020)

The legislative track moved faster than the campus organising track. The New York Civil Liberties Union and EPIC had been pressing Albany since the Lockport deployment; Fight for the Future added its mass-mobilization infrastructure to the coalition. In July 2020, the New York State legislature passed the Biometric Identifying Technology in Schools Act — the first state moratorium on biometric surveillance technology in US schools. The act established a two-year prohibition on school purchases or use of biometric technology and mandated a state study of the technology's impacts, effectiveness, and civil rights and privacy implications before any authorisation to proceed. In December 2020 Governor Cuomo signed the moratorium into law.

The moratorium's significance was structural as well as operational: it established that a state legislature could enact an outright temporary prohibition rather than merely requiring privacy impact assessments or procedural safeguards around otherwise permitted deployment. The "ban first, study second, authorise only on evidence" template — treating absence of prohibition as a policy default to challenge rather than a baseline to accommodate — became the approach the campaign subsequently pressed at the federal level, and one that other state coalitions could draw on in evaluating their own legislative options.

The 2023 permanent prohibition

The state biometrics study ran through 2022 and into 2023. On 27 September 2023, New York State Education Department Commissioner Betty A. Rosa issued a determination permanently prohibiting all New York schools from purchasing or using facial recognition technology, finding that "serious concerns do not outweigh claimed benefits." The determination made New York the first US state with a permanent statutory and regulatory prohibition on facial recognition in K-12 schools — a categorical ban rooted in an affirmative regulatory finding that the technology's civil rights and privacy risks could not be adequately mitigated through conditions on use. Commissioner Rosa's determination noted that schools could, subject to local privacy and civil-rights assessment and community input, consider other biometric technologies; but it held facial recognition to a categorically different standard, treating it as a prohibited technology rather than a regulated one. The Lockport system that had triggered the campaign was by this point already decommissioned.

The 2024 federal advocacy push

With New York's permanent ban secured, the campaign shifted its primary pressure target to federal guidance. In September 2024, Fight for the Future, Defending Rights & Dissent, and EPIC hand-delivered nearly 12,000 petition signatures to the US Department of Education calling for federal guidance directing schools to reject facial recognition technology, coordinating simultaneous back-to-school actions in California, Georgia, New York, and Washington DC. Encode Justice co-ordinated the California actions, connecting the campaign's petition infrastructure to the California youth AI-policy organizing network that Encode Justice had built through its state AI legislation campaigns. The campaign framed the Department of Education demand as a non-legislative application of the Biden administration's 2023 Executive Order on AI, which included language on the use of AI in education. No federal guidance had issued as of the research date.

The August 2025 campus surveillance escalation

By mid-2025 the campaign's university track had expanded beyond facial recognition to a broader challenge to campus surveillance infrastructure as a whole. In August 2025, Fight for the Future led 41 civil society organisations — including Amnesty International USA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, CAIR, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Freedom of the Press Foundation — in an open letter to US university administrators demanding they dismantle surveillance technologies and refuse to share student and faculty data with law enforcement.

The escalation was triggered by the Trump administration's documented use of campus surveillance systems to identify and target political protesters and international students for immigration enforcement, producing a chilling effect on political speech and a direct harm pathway for students who had organised on Palestinian rights, immigration, or other politically charged issues. The letter's six demands significantly broadened the campaign's scope: beyond facial recognition, the coalition demanded that universities dismantle ID swipe tracking, discontinue social media monitoring and online activity surveillance, remove license plate readers, motion sensors, and WiFi location tracking, and end biometric exam proctoring. The demand to refuse law enforcement data-sharing extended the campaign's argument from a student privacy frame into an academic freedom and political speech frame — arguing that surveillance infrastructure built ostensibly for student welfare and academic integrity had been repurposed as the operational substrate of state repression against campus political life.

Significance

The schools and campuses campaign is the corpus's primary entry for sustained US civil-society mobilization against AI and biometric surveillance in educational settings — a movement area distinct from the workplace surveillance, public-space surveillance, and law-enforcement facial recognition campaigns documented elsewhere in the corpus, and one with a distinctive harm theory centering the coercive nature of institutional enrolment and the disproportionate vulnerability of student populations.

The New York State permanent prohibition is the most binding state-level restriction on a deployed AI surveillance technology achieved by a US civil-society campaign through grassroots mobilization. Unlike the disclosure requirements, use-case limitations, or audit mandates that other facial recognition campaigns have produced, the NYSED determination reached a categorical prohibition rooted in an affirmative regulatory finding, creating a precedent other state education agencies must address rather than accommodate procedurally. The campaign's mechanism for converting the 2020 temporary moratorium into the 2023 permanent ban — framing the moratorium as a study period with a predetermined accountability standard, maintaining coalition pressure through the study, and treating the Commissioner's decision as a site of advocacy rather than a passive regulatory outcome — is a documented model for state coalitions attempting to translate legislative pauses into permanent prohibitions.

The campaign's coalition architecture reflects a deliberate intersectional framing that has been influential in subsequent US surveillance campaigns. The February 2020 open letter placed digital-rights groups, civil liberties organisations, Muslim community groups, immigrant rights organisations, and LGBTQ organisations on the same public record — constructing the argument that the communities facing disproportionate harm from facial recognition misidentification are the communities already facing structural exclusion. That coalition architecture, visible also in the August 2025 letter's addition of CAIR, Palestinian solidarity organisations, and the Center for Constitutional Rights to the signatory base, shows the campaign adapting its coalition in response to documented harm pathways as the political context shifts.

The campaign's position in this corpus connects to the broader surveillance resistance thread through Fight for the Future's portfolio: the parent banfacialrecognition.com campaign addresses government facial recognition across all sectors; the schools sub-campaign is the sector-specific application in educational settings. The international thread — anchored by Access Now's global biometric surveillance ban campaign and EDRi's European Citizens' Initiative — provides a comparative frame for the New York State outcome: a grassroots campaign converting a moratorium into a permanent prohibition through a domestic regulatory process, at a moment when comparable European efforts were targeting EU-wide legislative processes, makes the NYSED determination one of the few instances in any jurisdiction where a sector-specific permanent ban on a deployed AI surveillance technology has been achieved through civil-society sustained mobilization.