Where were you on Sept. 12?

Hasan Elahi, a Bangledesh-born American, was detained for hours by FBI agents at the Detroit airport. He could not prove his whereabouts.

Enduring nine polygraphs and searches of his residence and workplace – questioning that lasted six months – he became “so afraid he would be detained he started telling the FBI before he traveled anywhere”.

Later he developed another and more efficient method. Now his website, a streaming of his life, is the perfect alibi.

“OK, government, you want to watch me, come and watch me.”

He strapped a tracking bracelet to his ankle, hacked from his cellphone, that takes a picture and marks his GPS location. Everything he does is posted on his Web site. [story]

Elahi’s now defunct live tracking site http://elahi.rutgers.edu/ at Rutgers University where he teaches art, receives more than 160,000 hits per day. His novel life exhibit site is Tracking Transience.net.

Wired Magazine’s article is The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

The lifestreaming blog examines the “chronological aggregated view of your online activities” – the tools and issues of life logging. Lifestreaming Pros by Jeremy Wagstaff, Cons by Nicholas Carr, and Lifelogging with Gordon Bell is a solid introductory post.

Tim O’Reilly cites David Brin’s idea that “the proper response to the inevitable surveillance society is to embrace it, making sure that surveillance is evenly distributed, rather than just in the hands of a few.”