Go to British Universities, Get Spied Upon

British universities are allegedly spying on students from India and other nations designated as "Red Flag" countries to help MI5 and the Special Branch mount surveillance on potential terrorists. Their e-mails are being intercepted and their mobile calls listened to.

The Special Branch and MI5 are also running vetting operation in cooperation with most universities, according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph. The newspaper says that students' telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and home addresses are passed on by their universities to the police, MI5 and the Foreign Office.

Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Israel and North Korea are classified as Red Flag countries, apart from India.

The scheme to vet students was secretly set up after 9/11. It is said to go much beyond the controversial voluntary vetting system introduced in 1994 to stop the transfer of technology related to WMDs.

Under the 1994 scheme, many universities agreed to contact the government when assessing applicants from potential students from countries then designated as rogue states. But after 9/11, institutions were asked to go further and secretly gather information on foreign students.

It is believed that several students have been ordered to leave as a result of monitoring, because they may have had links with extremists.

Many are surprised that India has been included among the Red Flag states. One possibility is that Indian students are vetted because they have relatives across India's border, a source said.

But an Indian source told HT that the fact that two Indians had been arraigned for "helping terrorists" in Madrid, would only "widen" the monitoring of Indians in general.

An official was quoted in the report as saying, "… the more Madrid-style incidents there are the more this will be stepped up."

Ian Gibson, the Labour chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, has been critical of the monitoring. The vice-president of the National Union of Students, Chris Weavers, also says there has to be very strong reason for such surveillance.