Hasan M. Elahi

“You hear these horrible stories about the FBI just doing all these nasty things to people. And you know what? In my case, I didn't experience any of that, probably because the way I treated them. I was like, 'Okay, what do you want to know?' So I kept going back to their offices on a regular basis.”

“Big Brother doesn't like all these Little Brothers looking at it.”

“Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life.”

“To this day, I get very nervous coming back into my own country.”

“If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.”

“How do you manage your online identity? It's something I talk about with my students all the time.”

“I've pretty much accepted the fact that you're going to meet ignorant people, and that's okay. You can't control that. You can't change that.”

“It's incredibly disturbing when a country, particularly your own country, uses discrimination as a basis for an investigation.”

“You can accuse me of being a terror suspect, but I can prove to you that I'm not.”

“We're all creating an archive of our own lives, whether we're aware of it or not.”

“We don't know what the next generation of art is going to look like. We're kind of making it up as we go along. Not unlike the tech industry.”

“It's really weird watching the government watch me.”

“The concept of surveillance is ingrained in our beings. God was the original surveillance camera.”

“Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable.”

“I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'”

“I'm convinced that if we don't define ourselves, other people will do it for us, and inaccurately.”