During my Great Blogging Drought of summer 2007, I actually published a dozen or so articles that, bien sur, I didn’t blog about because I wasn’t blogging. So I’m going to slowly post ‘em over the next month or so.

This piece was particularly fun to write: A short profile of Hasan Elahi, an artist guy who accidentally got put on the feds’ watchlists. He realized the best way to keep the FBI off his back was to go totally transparent — so he started photoblogging everything he does, all day long, to establish a constant alibi.

Wired published the piece back in May, so it’s on their site, and a permanently archived copy is below!

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

by Clive Thompson

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,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “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.net.

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. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.