Giving the F.B.I. What It Wants

When Maryland educator and artist Hasan Elahi was erroneously flagged as a would-be terrorist and investigated by the FBI, he decided to cooperate and given them all the information they needed to clear himself… and more, much much more. He found that overwhelming them with irrelevant meticulous edtail about your life protects your privacy as well as trying to hide. It sort of reminds me of what some people did to resist the draft in the ’70’s, trying to paralyze and overwhelm the system by sending tons of data, or even bricks, for inclusion in their Selective Service files. Elahi conceived of it as an art project, and more:

“What I’m doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives has become so commonplace that we’re all — or at least hundreds of millions of us — doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.”