Artist Overwhelms Government Agencies With Personal Data After Being Targeted
When Bangladesh-born artist Hasan Elahi was stopped at an airport in 2002 and then put through several months of scary interrogations he decided that hiding anything from the government was pointless. Instead of hiding his information Elahi decided to bottleneck those agencies that interrogated him by posting an overwhelming amount of data about himself on his personal website.
On his site Elahi puts up pics of everywhere he eats, what his dinner fork looks like, what his food looks like and everything else he observes throughout the day.
Writing in the New York Times. Elahi says:
“You want to watch me? Fine … But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.”
After launching his website Hasan began to track server logs and discovered that he was being watched by the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Executive Office of the President.
Just for a bit of fun Elahi has made it hard to decipher a timeline for his websites information, deliberately making his data hard to place into any type of useful order.
“By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life,” he writes. “In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up.”
Do you think Hasan Elahi’s website is a good way to waste U.S. officials time after they spent months attempting to tie him to crimes that they could never prove?
