You Want to Track Me? Here You Go, F.B.I.

[Eugen Leitl]

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/giving-the-fbi-what-it-wants.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
] You Want to Track Me? Here You Go, F.B.I.

By HASAN M. ELAHI

ON June 19, 2002, I ran into a bit of a problem that turned my life upside
down. It happened at the Detroit airport as I was entering the country. I
realized something wasnbt right when the immigration agent at United States
Customs slid my passport through the reader, then froze. bIs there something
wrong?b I asked. He was still frozen. After a few moments, he said, bFollow
me, please,b and I ended up at the Immigration and Naturalization Servicebs
airport office.

It was a large room filled with foreign-looking people, and fear was written
on all their faces; this was their first day in the United States, and things
were evidently not going well. Typically, there is little overlap between the
I.N.S. and American citizens like me, and when I tried to find out from one
of the agents what I was doing there, he seemed just as confused as I was.

Eventually, a man in a dark suit approached and said, bI expected you to be
older.b I asked if he could please explain what was happening, and he said,
bYou have some explaining to do yourself.b

We then entered an interrogation room, barren and stark white with a camera
in the corner. He sat across from me at an L-shaped desk and asked me to
retrace the path Ibd taken since I had left the United States. He asked me
various detailed questions for a good half hour and then, out of nowhere,
said, bWhere were you September 12?b

Fortunately, Ibm neurotic about record keeping. I had my Palm P.D.A. with me;
I looked up Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001 on my calendar. I read him the
contents: bpay storage rent at 10; meeting with Judith at 10:30; intro class
from 12 to 3; advanced class from 3 to 6.b We read about six months of my
calendar appointments. I donbt think he was expecting me to have such
detailed records.

He continued, bYou had a storage unit in Tampa, right?b

bYes, near the university.b

bWhat did you have in it?b

bBoxes of winter clothes, furniture I canbt fit in my apartment, some
assorted junk and garage sale material.b

bNo explosives?b

bIbm certain I didnbt have any explosives.b

bWell, we received a report that you had explosives and had fled on September
12.b

Given that I was very cooperative, and also had meticulous records that
showed what I did when, I think he began to realize that whatever report he
had was erroneous.

A few weeks later, a Justice Department official called my office in Tampa
and said he wanted to speak to me about my interview in Detroit. He asked me
to come to the Federal Building downtown, where he led me into a room where
he and an F.B.I. agent interrogated me about where Ibd been and when, and had
I witnessed acts that might be detrimental to the interests of the United
States or a foreign country, and had I ever met anyone from Al Qaeda, Islamic
Jihad, Hamas or Hezbollah. The F.B.I. agent seemed to know quite remarkable
details about things like the regular versus the Hezbollah bus routes in
Beirut, and the person memorialized in the statue at the entrance of the
American University there. His knowledge frightened me.

I COULD have contested the legality of the investigation and gotten a lawyer.
But I thought that would make things messier. It was clear who had the power
in this situation. And when youbre face to face with someone with so much
power, you behave in an unusual manner. You dare not take any action. You
rely on instincts and do what you need to survive. I told them everything.

The questioning went on for the next six months and ended with a series of
polygraph examinations. I must have completed these to the agentsb
satisfaction; eventually an interrogating agent told me that I had been
cleared and that everything was fine and said that if I needed anything I
should call him. I was planning to travel in the weeks ahead and was nervous
about entering the country; I asked the agent about this, and he told me to
call him with the information about my flights and said he would take care of
everything.

Shortly after, I called the F.B.I. to report my whereabouts. I chose to. I
wanted to make sure that the bureau knew that I wasnbt making any sudden
moves and that I wasnbt running off somewhere. I wanted them to know where I
was and what I was doing at any given time.

Soon I began to e-mail the F.B.I. I started to send longer e-mails, with
pictures, and then with links to Web sites I made. I wrote some clunky code
for my phone back in 2003 and turned it into a tracking device.

My thinking was something like, bYou 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.b

In the process of compiling data about myself and supplying it to the F.B.I.,
I started thinking about what intelligence agents might not know about me. I
created a list of every flight Ibve ever been on, since birth. For the more
recent flights, I noted the exact flight numbers, recorded in my frequent
flier accounts, and also photographs of the meals that I ate on each flight,
as well as photos of each knife provided by each airline on each flight.

On my Web site, I compiled various databases that show the airports Ibve been
in, food Ibve eaten at home, food Ibve eaten on the road, random hotel beds
Ibve slept in, various parking lots off Interstate 80 that I parked in, empty
train stations I saw, as well as very specific information like photos of the
tacos I ate in Mexico City between July 5 and 7, and the toilets I used.

These images seem empty, and could be anywhere, but theybre not; they are
extremely specific records of my exact travels to particular places. There
are 46,000 images on my site. I trust that the F.B.I. has seen all of them.
Agents know where Ibve bought my duck-flavored paste, or kimchi, laundry
detergent and chitlins; because I told them everything.

I also provided screenshots of my financial data, communications records and
transportation logs. Visitors to my site can cross-reference these records
with my images in a way thatbs similar to how the F.B.I. cross-references the
very same databases. I provided information from third parties (including my
bank, phone company, etc.) who can verify that I was at the locations
indicated, on the dates and times specified on my Web site.

PEOPLE who visit my site b and my server logs indicate repeat visits from the
Department of Homeland Security, the C.I.A., the National Reconnaissance
Office and the Executive Office of the President b donbt find my information
organized clearly. In fact, the interface I use is deliberately
user-unfriendly. A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands
of available points of information. By putting everything about me out there,
I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. Despite the
barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a
surprisingly private and anonymous life.

In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to
maintain privacy may be to give it up. Information agencies operate in an
industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it
valuable. If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my
information, the intelligence the F.B.I. has on me will be of no value.
Making my private information public devalues the currency of the information
the intelligence gatherers have collected.

My activities may be more symbolic than not, but if 300 million people
started sending private information to federal agents, the government would
need to hire as many as another 300 million people, possibly more, to keep up
with the information and webd have to redesign our entire intelligence
system.

East Germany tried this some decades back; it didnbt work out to be such a
great plan for them. We have incredibly intelligent people and very
sophisticated computer systems in various agencies in Washington, but the
culture of these agencies prevents us from evolving beyond the cold-war-era
mind-set. (There are people in Washington who still refer to China as bRed
China.b) Fortunately, people in government have begun to see that collecting
information is less useful than figuring out how to analyze it.

When I first started talking about my project in 2003, people thought I was
insane. Why would anyone tell everyone what he was doing at all times? Why
would anyone want to share a photo of every place he visited? Now eight years
later, more than 800 million people do the same thing Ibve been doing each
time they update their status or post an image or poke someone on Facebook.
(Just to put this in perspective, if Facebook was a country, it would have
the third highest population, after China and India.) Insane?

What Ibm doing is no longer just an art project; creating our own archives
has become so commonplace that webre all b or at least hundreds of millions
of us b doing it all the time. Whether we know it or not.

Hasan M. Elahi is an associate professor and an interdisciplinary artist at
the University of Maryland. This article is adapted from a forthcoming TED
Talk.