Perfect Alibi

Imagine you are a Bangladeshi born American and, by some mistake, you happen to be on the terrorist watch list. What would you do?

After an incident at the Detroit airport in 2002, 35-year-old artist Hasan Elahi has found a solution: he has put his entire life online.

Clive Thomspon explains:
“Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now […] It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi‘s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both…”
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TrackingTransience