Mason Gross Assistant Professor Hasan Elahi says his latest artistic exhibition has more than one purpose – not only to comment on the role of technology and surveillance in modern society, but also to save himself from being shipped off to Guantánamo Bay.
The website,“Tracking Transience,” makes Elahi’s movements known to just about anyone in the world with an interest. Having been a “person of interest” to the FBI for at least nine months in the years after September 11, 2001, Elahi figures the demand for his most personal information is out there.
A visit to the site reveals his location at any time of the day. His cell phone is outfitted with a Global Positioning System, and a flashing, red arrow on a satellite map points, in most cases, to his exact location.
Elahi is a prodigious traveler, and the tracker proves it. His flights to Indonesia, Malawi, Senegal, Italy, South Africa, his native Bangladesh, and numerous other countries are documented on the site. So are all the meals he’s eaten on flights to and fro, as well as the meals he consumes in restaurants and at street vendors. Elahi even photographs bathrooms across the world.
“I wanted to demonstrate to a point of absurdity ... to go so far with the transparency, that maybe someone will say ‘Something’s not right here.’ So I have no problem using myself as a subject to play out the ramifications of these new homeland security and Patriot Act laws,” he said. “I’m using it to keep myself out of Guantánamo.”
Several months after September 11, 2001, Elahi traveled from Dakar, Senegal, to Detroit. As he passed through customs, the immigration agent checking passports blanched. “He didn’t even look at me, he was just completely frozen,” Elahi recalled. “He took a few minutes to compose himself, and says ‘follow me, please’ and walks me through a rat maze at the Detroit airport ... I end up in an INS detention facility, which is kind of ironic, given that being an American citizen, you usually don’t get taken in by INS.”
Elahi’s detention – he was released after several hours of interrogation by an FBI agent who would be present at later meetings – resulted from a report made the day after September 11, 2001. Elahi kept a locker at a storage facility in Tampa, where he taught at the University of South Florida. The owners of the facility told police “an Arab guy” with explosives emptied the locker and fled after the attacks.
That day in 2002 was the beginning of a series of interrogations by the FBI in the bureau’s regional office in Tampa, capped off by nine consecutive polygraph tests conducted in one day. Elahi’s worst fear throughout the ordeal was that he would be shipped to Guantánamo Bay, never to be heard from again by his friends or family. He was “exonerated” after several months, although he was never charged with any crime.
Before each session with his FBI agent – to whom he refers as casually as “my accountant” or “my personal trainer” – Elahi would always notify close friends of his whereabouts. “I told them if you don’t hear from me, cause a big stink, because that’s the only way you’ll find out what happened,” he said. “But fortunately we never got to that level.”
Elahi was already an obsessive scheduler, never without his PDA. When interrogators asked him where he was the day after the attacks, he pulled out the gadget and found that he had been swamped with work setting up a large art exhibition. The agents conducting the interrogations – Elahi said they preferred to call them “interviews” – demanded a huge amount of information, played “good cop, bad cop,” but always acted in a professional manner.
Elahi believes that references to his affinity for country music and college football led his questioners to accept him more as a human being than a suspect – and that the remarks saved him from being detained. The investigators never explicitly mentioned incarceration, but “that implied threat is so much scarier than the threat itself,” Elahi said.
Elahi said that “Tracking Transience,” on the surface, seems to push the boundary of the concept of the surveillance society. But he challenges his audience to question whether the boundary hasn’t already been thrust aside by all of us. Today, people post their photos, innermost thoughts, and daily schedules on personal webpages, MySpace, and other social networking sites. While taking a critical approach to technology and surveillance, Elahi said the advent and rapid development of the transparent society has some positive implications, as government and private institutions will soon adopt the same transparency which, in his judgment, is sorely lacking today.
“When this generation gets to a level when they are in the workforce and they are making decisions, we will see more and more transparency, because they are growing up with it,” Elahi said.
Since the authorities wanted so much information, Elahi
decided to make it easy for them.
The FBI and federal intelligence-gathering agencies deal in restricted information. As a media artist, Elahi himself views information as a commodity. “What happens if I borrow a very simple economic principle, of flooding the market with so much information to the point where the currency has no value? By me volunteering every bit of my information to literally everyone, it devalues my FBI file. There is nothing worth keeping secret in it.”