Want to Track Me, Feds? Here's Everything I Do

Targeted by the INS and the FBI after 9/11, one American artist reacted by overwhelming authorities with reams of personal data. Officials stopped Bangladesh-born Hasan Elahi at an airport in 2002 and, over several months, put him through hours of scary interrogations. Agreeing to update them on his activities, he created a website with pics of where he goes, what he eats, what his dinner fork looks like—everything. “You want to watch me? Fine," Elahi writes in the New York Times. "But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.”

Server logs at his site indicate it's been looked at by the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Executive Office of the President. But Elahi deliberately leaves the data disorganized, making it a kind of art installation. "By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life," he writes. "In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up." (More Hasan Elahi stories.)