'I Became My Own Big Brother'

After the FBI questioned a minority artist, he became his own Big Brother.

ByABC News
May 30, 2007, 5:24 PM

May 30, 2007 — -- When the FBI started to track to every move of artist Hasan Elahi, he responded by giving his personal information to the whole world.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Elahi, like many minorities across the United States was flagged as a potential terrorist.

The Bangladesh-born, Brooklyn, NY-raised media artist often travels overseas for work, and with his Arab-sounding name and dark skin, Elahi found himself the subject of an FBI interrogation in June 2002.

He was detained and interrogated by airport and government officials while on his way back from a business trip in Dakar, Senegal.

Although he was cleared to enter the country, Elahi's travel nightmare was far from over. From June 2002 until December 2002, he was the subject of an ongoing U.S. government investigation, which included intense questioning, lie-detector tests and documentation of his every move.

"For six months, I had to justify every second my existence, proving to the FBI that I was not a terrorist or a terrorist threat of any kind," Elahi told ABC News. "So, after having to recount every detail of my life to the micro level, I said to myself, 'Why don't I just do this myself?'"

Elahi's experiment started slowly. He initially recorded his coordinates every couple of hours via a cell phone he had implanted with GPS software as a way of keeping the FBI informed of his whereabouts.

He then posted the information on his Web site, www.trackingtransience.net, and created a documentary art exhibition, "Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project," to make all his personal information, from his current location to his bank statements and telephone records available to the public.

"If you think about it, intelligence agencies are all based on the commodity of information and secrecy," said Elahi. "So, I started thinking what if I just volunteer my information? What that does is make my FBI profile useless because everything you would want to know, now you can just come to me and cut out the middleman. I've basically become my own Big Brother."

In the past few years, Elahi's site has expanded, thanks in part to technological advances but also as a result of his dedication to this project.

"It's hard to say when this art project started, because it was a very organic process," he said. "It started out as just an image on a computer screen, then a map, then a little more detailed map, and now it's completely full blown to the point where you can dig out any little detail about my life. Everything's out there."