CCTV Romance, Drone Strikes and Serving Face
- Paulie
- Jan 22, 2023
- 8 min read
The biggest FBI dossier of all time
In 2002, Hasan Elahi was stopped and detained at Detroit Airport. A professor of art at the University of Maryland, Elahi was mistaken for a name on a terrorism watchlist and questioned by the FBI. An early victim of the rapidly expanding tendrils of the post-911 surveillance state, Elahi responded in an unconventional fashion. Rather than battling for his rights to privacy in court or even (lol, imagine) seeking reparations against the FBI for the blatant profiling, Elahi decided to document every conceivable moment of his life. The image above is a snapshot of an archive which contains over 70,000 photos of beds, transport, food, toilets, landmarks, people, that Elahi has encountered since that day. Elahi has made a point of emailing the FBI these images routinely. Probably the biggest file on a “terrorist” the FBI has ever assembled.
This project has been reported on many times over the years, from WIRED, to Elahi’s own TED talk. Often writers have used Elahi to stage a discussion on surveillance, art and the era of the digital footprint. Wouldn’t it be wacky and zany of me if I did as well? It’s 2023 and it doesn’t feel like hyperbole to state that the sense of being constantly watched and judged is a homestay of the internet. For some, it’s the entire motivation for engaging in social activity online - to seek validation and if possible, to monetise their image and market it to others, even if this means a near complete sacrifice of privacy. It has its own vocabulary, logic, economy that we all subscribe to to some degree. Cookies, biometrics, monetisation, swatting, doxxing, assassination coordinates! Each individual has to contend with how much of themselves they want online. But what about the versions of ourselves we simply cannot avoid giving away?
In this letter, we’ll explore some of the ways artists have responded to the growth of the surveillance state and the ways we interact with the powers that be. Buckle up bitch. Let’s advance together chronologically (woah!).
