Hiding in Plain Sight

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Once an FBI suspect, Hasan Elahi now does the FBI a favor by monitoring himself every minute of the day.

By KEVIN SITES

What would you do if you were suspected of a crime that could send you to jail cell in Guantanamo Bay for untold years?

When it happened to Hasan Elahi, he decided to put his life online, for all to see.

The 35-year-old Rutgers University art professor was born in Bangladesh but raised in America. He was flying back home to the U.S. in 2002 when he was stopped at immigration and led to a detention facility in the Detroit Airport.

Elahi was asked about a storage unit he had once rented in Florida. The FBI had gotten a tip that it had been packed with explosives, and that an Arab man had fled from the area the day after the 9/11 attacks.

The tip ended up being false ("Never mind that I'm not an Arab," Elahi notes), but it took him nine lie-detector tests and six months to clear his name. When the FBI finally told him he was no longer a suspect, he requested a letter from them saying exactly that.

But, he says, the FBI refused: Because he was never officially charged, there was also nothing to officially clear. Instead, the agency gave him a phone number and told him to call if he had any more troubles coming in and out of the country.

Shaken by the experience, Elahi started calling the FBI preemptively, telling them of his travel plans, where he would be going and when he would be flying home. But as time when on, Elahi considered how absurd the process was — and upped the ante. He started sending the FBI email and even uploading time-stamped photos of his movements.

He eventually created a website, trackingtransience.net, in which those photos were automatically posted to a map, creating a visual tracking device of where he was at any time.

Elahi saw the act as protection, protest and art, flooding the web with so much information — photographs of every meal, every airport, and even public urinals that he used — that the very density of it all, while public and available for everyone to see, created a new sense of anonymity. He was hiding in plain sight. And while the photographs give away his location, they never include himself — only his point of view.

"You know exactly where I am, but yet, you don't really know where I am," he says, enigmatically. "So it kind of plays with this real beauty of telling you everything and yet telling you nothing."

Years after the detention that prompted his project, Elahi says he will probably continue it indefinitely. He says it has become as natural as breathing for him.

But it doesn't always appeal to those close to him.

"I've had friends who say, "Hey, don't show up at my house." And I have to respect that," Elahi says. "I have to respect their right to privacy. But in general, the people around me, it's become pretty invisible."

Much of the email Elahi gets from the public is supportive, although some worry that he'll give more ideas to "Big Brother."

The point of his project is clear, he says: There is no such thing as privacy in the electronic age.

"I mean, every little thing we're doing is being monitored. Everything that we do is tracked," he says.

Attempts by Yahoo! News to obtain FBI comment were unsuccessful. But with an estimated half a million people on the FBI's terrorist watch list, Elahi says he still has fears about America's post 9/11 posture and hopes his project may highlight the dangers of sacrificing liberty for security.

The body of work he has created has already found a life outside the Web, with 30,000 of his photographs to be featured this month in a video installation at the Sundance Film Festival.

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http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/59371/hi...-in-plain-sight

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Way to go Hasan!

[LaL 418]

great article Steven

[sara535 15]

that makes me laugh. Good for him!

[wishbone 0]

I think he's doing too much, I was screening the story for public sympathy.

[almaty 19]

i think, he is doing what he feels is necessary