The National Security Agency canceled its attendance at an NYU Tandon career fair after more than 60 students signed a petition calling for the organization’s removal, arguing that it unethically shares data with the Israeli government.
In a Wednesday Instagram post, NYU’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society declared “victory” after a Tandon representative confirmed the withdrawal of NSA’s participation. The student organizers announced last Thursday that they would stage a picket outside of the Tandon School of Engineering if NSA was not removed, referencing allegations that the agency collected communication data of foreigners and U.S. citizens without permission and is giving the data to Israeli intelligence.
“The NSA informed us that they were unable to attend the Career Fair due to the federal government shutdown,” Tandon spokesperson Leah Schmerl wrote in a statement to WSN. “The event is proceeding successfully today, with strong student turnout and meaningful connections made between Tandon students and employers looking to hire graduates and provide internships to students that will help propel their careers.”
SDS member and Tandon senior Ebtesham Ahmed said that NSA was taken down from the career fair’s Handshake directory on Monday and removed from the list of attending employers before Wednesday morning. Ahmed added that Tandon did not post NSA’s information through QR codes on empty tables for students to review, which has been the case with organizations that withdrew in the past.
“It was a problem that such a criminal and heinous organization was welcome onto NYU campus,” Ahmed told WSN. “This has been a pattern that NYU has been repeatedly doing, but we’ve been repeatedly fighting back and getting other companies and scaring them away from attending career fairs.”
In August and December 2024, SDS led dozens of students demanding NYU cut ties with companies and institutions, such as the U.S. Navy, with ties to Israel. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement canceled recruitment interviews with NYU School of Law students in February after over 1,000 people signed a petition calling for its removal from the school’s Public Interest Legal Career Fair. Six days later, SDS spearheaded a petition that garnered dozens of signatures that requested the removal of CIA presence at a spring internship fair.
NSA, which multiple organizations have called “Big Brother” as a reference to a symbol in George Orwell’s “1984” novel, was founded to centralize information during the Cold War. In 2013, a whistleblower alleged that the NSA shared Palestinian-Americans’ communications with their relatives in Israeli-occupied territories with Israeli intelligence. Reports from 2024 revealed that companies used the data to train artificial intelligence that targets and kills Palestinians in the ongoing war in Gaza. In January, a New York judge ruled that “warrantless surveillance” violates constitutional rights to privacy.
“They claimed that the NSA did not show up because of the ongoing government shutdown,” Ahmed said. “But we think that our organizing, our efforts to publicize the crimes that they’re doing to NYU students and even our community members definitely played a critical role in scaring them away.”
Contact Paige Ablon at [email protected].