Hasan M. Elahi Quotes

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

Hasan M. Elahi

#2. 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.

Hasan M. Elahi

#3. The concept of surveillance is ingrained in our beings. God was the original surveillance camera.

Hasan M. Elahi

#4. 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?'

Hasan M. Elahi

#5. It's really weird watching the government watch me.

Hasan M. Elahi

#6. 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.

Hasan M. Elahi

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

Hasan M. Elahi

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

Hasan M. Elahi

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

Hasan M. Elahi

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

Hasan M. Elahi

#11. Big Brother doesn't like all these Little Brothers looking at it.

Hasan M. Elahi

#12. To this day, I get very nervous coming back into my own country.

Hasan M. Elahi

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

Hasan M. Elahi

#14. 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.

Hasan M. Elahi

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

Hasan M. Elahi

#16. 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.

Hasan M. Elahi