It's a little like Brazil

Ramak Fazel - Storefront for Art and Architecture - Art - New York Times

IN a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak Fazel came across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and elegant, his English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered here and there with an Italian phrase

He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for nearly three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his baggage and photocopied the pages of his personal agenda.

That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he takes pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he makes sure his face is always immaculately cleanshaven.

“I have become the poster boy for Gillette,” he said, somewhat ruefully.

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Reading the story linked to above is like reading The Trial. This man happens to be my good friend's cousin and it makes a reality the fears that I always joked about as an Iranian-American who was vocally anti-war and anti-Bush. As Fazel, a naturalized American citizen, went about working on his project of sending postcards from each state capitol with stamps from his childhood stamp collection, he came under the suspicious eye of government anti-terrorist forces. Apparently, a vigilante airline passenger to whom he described his project photographed him while he was sleeping and reported him to authorities. For the rest of his trip, Fazel was interrogated, prevented from parking his car in certain places, and prevented bodily access to some government buildings.

The echoes of Kafka make his story frightening. He was unable to get investigators to tell him why he was being stopped or how he could prove his innocence. He was simply on the watch list, subject to trial by investigator whenever the government was inclined. Fazel's only recourse was to act pleasant and get the names of each investigator he talked to, perhaps as a way of wielding accountability as a way of restraining investigators' excesses.

Under similar circumstances, Hasan Elahi, a middle eastern man framed by coincidence, "fought back" by putting his entire life online. His motives were alternately proving that he had nothing to hide, enlisting the government as his ally rather than interrogator, and by toying with overloading the government with information. However, divulging all really a solution, even if it causes information overload today? As long as the recording body stores the volunteered information, it threatens to gain the information processing capacity at some point in the future unknown to the subject of surveillance. Like in "The Trial," the review of one's records and scheduling of a trial can happen at any time. This would seem to have the same effect as the panopticon, where one is being surveilled some of the time but they cannot be sure when.