Hasan Elahi is a Bangladesh-Born New Jersey artist & art professor. He was detained by the FBI and interviewed about every detail of his life. He now developed a web site to track every move of his life, for FBI or anyone else who might be interested. He hacked his cell phone and links it to his web page. Now his webpage show his where about in a GPS supported map. He is also posting photos of what he is seeing, eating and so on as alibi. He is logging every dollars he is spending and where. He turned around the whole situation, at least as it appears now. His biggest shortcoming is now his biggest asset as an artist. Very brilliant, good job!
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In the News:
CNN's Kiran Chetry talks to a man who developed software to track his
every move to prove he's not a terrorist. (May 30)
Video Link: http://www.cnn.com/video/partners/clickability/index.html?url=/video/tech/2007/05/30/gps.on.line.alibi.elahi.cnn
ABC News reports:
Artist combats FBI profile by creating online alibi
Rebecca Lee
(5/30/07) - When the FBI started to track to every move of artist Hasan Elahi, he responded by giving his personal information to the whole world.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Elahi, like many minorities across the United States was flagged as a potential terrorist.
The Bangladesh-born, Brooklyn, NY-raised media artist often travels overseas for work, and with his Arab-sounding name and dark skin, Elahi found himself the subject of an FBI interrogation in June 2002.
He was detained and interrogated by airport and government officials while on his way back from a business trip in Dakar, Senegal.
Although he was cleared to enter the country, Elahi's travel nightmare was far from over. From June 2002 until December 2002, he was the subject of an ongoing U.S. government investigation, which included intense questioning, lie-detector tests and documentation of his every move.
"For six months, I had to justify every second my existence, proving to the FBI that I was not a terrorist or a terrorist threat of any kind," Elahi told ABC News. "So, after having to recount every detail of my life to the micro level, I said to myself, 'Why don't I just do this myself?'"
Elahi's experiment started slowly. He initially recorded his coordinates every couple of hours via a cell phone he had implanted with GPS software as a way of keeping the FBI informed of his whereabouts.
He then posted the information on his Web site, www.trackingtransience.net, and created a documentary art exhibition, "Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project," to make all his personal information, from his current location to his bank statements and telephone records available to the public.
"If you think about it, intelligence agencies are all based on the commodity of information and secrecy," said Elahi. "So, I started thinking & what if I just volunteer my information? What that does is make my FBI profile useless because everything you would want to know, now you can just come to me and cut out the middleman. I've basically become my own Big Brother."
'Everything's Out There'
In the past few years, Elahi's site has expanded, thanks in part to technological advances but also as a result of his dedication to this project.
"It's hard to say when this art project started, because it was a very organic process," he said. "It started out as just an image on a computer screen, then a map, then a little more detailed map, and now it's completely full blown to the point where you can dig out any little detail about my life. Everything's out there."
But there are some pieces of information he's keeping private. While Elahi photographs his meals and surroundings, his self-surveillance is not completely without bias.
Like any art project, the artist has the ability to shape the online profile he is creating of himself and does not include his own photo or images of his friends. From the pictures he chooses to post, to the locations he chooses to record, Elahi's "Tracking Transience" is really a reflection of how he would like to be defined.
"By taking matters into my own hands, I decided that I'm going to define myself based on my own information, not based on what someone else thinks I might be and this is really the center of this project. It's really all about identity management," explained Elahi.
Yet, he points out, the places you visit and the things you buy and eat, even when "managed," only show us a certain portion of a person's true self. "When you stitch together all this information you really know everything and nothing about me, because nowhere is my name, nowhere is my face, nowhere is there one actual thing that identifies me," said Elahi.
Ultimately, Elahi hopes his documentary experiment will serve a dual purpose. By keeping track of his records and whereabouts, he hopes to avoid any further involvement with the U.S. government and, second, by supplying the public with all his information, he hopes that people will question the ways in which our society is being tracked and policed, often without our knowledge or our consent.
"I'm hoping to take this [project] to such a point of absurdity that someone somewhere out there realizes, 'Hey, this isn't right. We shouldn't be living in a society where we have to do this,'" Elahi explained. "I'm just hoping that people start questioning, because if we don't, people won't even realize that [this kind of tracking] is even happening."
Source: http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=sci_tech&id=5354459&ft=print
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