Interview for the International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity, Brill, Netherlands, about Art and Hacktivism, 2026.
In this interview, guest editors Marieke Drost and Joes Segal speak with artist and activist Paolo Cirio about his artistic research into the entanglements of surveillance technology, politics and social justice. In his art projects focused on data mining, online manipulation, biometric surveillance and artificial intelligence, Cirio takes a hacker’s perspective on emerging digital technologies, often turning the very malpractices he seeks to expose, such as online data mining and privacy violations, against people or institutions in power. Moreover, he has advocated for regulatory and legal change, including ‘the right to be forgotten’ and a ban on facial recognition. Based on his projects, Cirio reflects on the intersection of art, advocacy, governance and justice. Published online 8 April 2026.
MD & JS: By way of introduction: what initially sparked your interest in surveillance and facial recognition? And what inspired you to combine being an artist, activist and hacker? What is your process in combining these activities for different projects?
PC: I have been interested in the underground hacker culture from an early age, especially its political and activist dimension. I was then also into avantgarde art and somehow, I always felt I was an activist. Combining these interests in a form of art is very natural to me.
I worked on several subjects. When technology impacts a particular social field, I urge to address it with investigation, action, provocation and then advocacy to solve the issue. I have done so in the fields of economic inequality, climate change and concerning digital rights. When social media and facial recognition began to be dangerous for society at large, I immediately started to make projects about that.
MD & JS: On your website you mention how your work Open Society Structure (2009) lays the foundation for your later work. How did this work inform your later focus on surveillance?
PC: I believe that democratic principles in culture, politics and economy are intertwined by technology these days. That is why in my projects I address these three main fields from a theoretical standpoint and then with investigations and interventions in specific issues.
I believe that governance itself, its design, principles and implementation, is a creative process. Artists can be naturally active in imagining and forming it. The historical engagement of artists in the idea of Utopia is the most evident example. With my work, I advance the idea of Utopia and actions for social justice within technology and all its interconnected social fields. In the diagram of the artworks Open Society Structure and Global Direct (2014) I integrated imagination and creativity with studies in political science and network technology in order to create these sophisticated diagrams of a utopian contemporary society, which hopefully inspire to aim for such ideal societal structures.
Later, after working on several projects for better governance, I came out with the notion of Regulatory Art. I coined this term for a type of art that integrates legal regulations within artistic projects 1. Socially engaged artists aim to foster social change, they intervene directly into the decline of social justice. That is the drive of artists who inform, envision and advocate for new and better regulations that can produce positive change in society. In such a way, regulation itself becomes the material for art making.
MD & JS: In 2011 you launched your project Face to Facebook, appropriating one million Facebook accounts through hacking, using facial recognition and emotion detection software on uploaded portrait images, and turning them into a dating website. What were the responses to this project? What did you want to achieve? And how did you deal with the ethical dilemma of ‘stealing’ private information to highlight a fundamental privacy issue?
PC: I consider this art project one of the very first that addressed the bias and surveillance potentials of facial recognition and artificial intelligence applied to the masses. Now these themes are common, but believe me, in 2011 it was still science fiction and hard to imagine it could become the reality of today. Finding an algorithm for detecting facial expression was very hard and there was no known implementation of such technology.
Meanwhile, it was also the beginning of social media, everyone was still very enthusiastic and careless about what they would upload to the internet, especially on Facebook. For hackers like me it was shocking to see so many personal pictures being posted on such insecure platforms. That’s why I decided to work so hard on this project with such powerful provocation. I involved media theorist Alessandro Ludovico for this mission, while collecting a million profiles of Facebook and experimenting with facial recognition technology.
The media coverage of this provocative dating website made from Facebook profiles was huge. Facebook also threatened us legally, which was a success for us. Our aims were to make people aware of the danger of facial recognition and in particular of Facebook, which was already abusing the data of its users and had very little security in place to protect it. For the first time, questions about data mining, ownership and brokerage became clear through an artwork.
After all, privacy is a cultural perception, and it is evolving through cultural contexts and values. At the time, most people were not too concerned about the risk of uploading their private photos or data on social media, nor knowing what Facebook could do with that. This project was done several years before the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). It helped to make people aware of the danger, with a very small simulation of what Meta does on a much bigger scale on its user data today, with less of its users’ knowledge.
MD & JS: What is the background of your Overexposed series of unauthorized photos of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officers (2015), which you created in the wake of the Snowden revelations? Why did you choose the specific HD Stencils street art technique for this series? What do you hope to achieve with ‘watching the watchers’?
PC: Edward Snowden’s revelations have historical relevance for a few reasons. Surely it was a first backlash against the restrictions of civil liberties implemented after 9/11. It also provided a look into the extensive and secretive human rights abuses of contemporary American imperialism. This was in the context of the WikiLeaks revelations by Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning a few years earlier. In particular, I think Snowden’s revelations are also a key moment in the history of the internet and how it is perceived. Before he published them, the popular conception was that mass surveillance was limited to countries like China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. The scandal that Snowden revealed was amplified by the global media so well (also thanks to his strategic engagement with the press) that the idea of the internet being tapped by any government for mass surveillance was finally largely popularized. As a result, people were becoming aware of the dangers and started using privacy protection measures. Also, technologically, the internet has changed drastically since the Snowden revelations. Finally, encryption technology started to be implemented widely in infrastructures and platforms, making communications harder to intercept. I remember the internet before Snowden. It was ridiculously unsecure, most data flows, including emails and web browsing, could be intercepted very easily.
However, it’s important to notice that it wasn’t just these technological vulnerabilities and the capability of tapping satellites and submarine telecommunication cables that made mass surveillance possible. The capture of massive amounts of data was also enabled by legislation and by the fact that governmental agencies were politically invested in implementing such huge surveillance projects.
Finally, it was possible because of the very few individuals in charge of agencies such as the NSA (National Security Agency), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), operating in such secrecy to a point that there wasn’t any democratic oversight over what they were doing. It wasn’t just a technical capability, but first of all, a political and legal capability. That’s why I wanted to focus on holding these directors accountable. When the government failed to do so, Overexposed became a sort of public shaming from below.
I spent months trying to find unauthorized pictures of the directors of the US’s intelligence agencies, focusing on the photos in which they look more ridiculous. Then I made posters of them with a graffiti technique and pasted them for a street art campaign that took place in New York, London, Berlin and Paris between April and May 2015.
In total, I focused on nine different high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials of the NSA, CIA and FBI, who were responsible for political measures or advocated for mass surveillance and espionage programs. I made them pop with a street art technique and subsequently turned them into fine art paintings that I show in the art world, museums, art fairs etc., making these figures almost celebrities – secret master spies that until then had been mostly unknown by the general public but were now exposed in front of everyone.
MD & JS: In your work Obscurity (2016), you used the mugshots of fifteen million people who were incarcerated in the US; public information, found through search engines. How did you use these materials to restore the privacy and dignity of people who have been arrested?
PC: This project was addressing criminal data and mugshots produced by mass incarceration in the US. This type of data is in the public domain in most of the US, and so it circulates on the internet and gets repackaged and traded by companies with very little or no constraint. It’s not just a question of privacy. This data produces widespread discrimination. In fact, even if an individual was arrested for a mistake, or because they were racially profiled, or for a petty crime, this data will flag the individual forever. Then, there is the same discrimination in the form of bias. When we see a mugshot, we see a criminal, or we naturally judge their face, expression, to see if they look bad or dangerous. This type of bias is now automated by data mining and artificial intelligence (AI). AI with facial recognition was trained on U.S. mugshots, so several AI models of today have such biases embedded. Also, criminal data in the U.S. is so vast that it is often traded by the data brokerage industry, a dark market that provides databases for background checks. The AI models of today have embedded these and use them to judge us when we open an Amazon account, try to get a mortgage or simply apply for a job.
In the Obscurity project, I stole 15 million photos and criminal records from mugshots websites. These websites were exposing and exploiting such data to benefit from the incarcerated. I shuffled the data and blurred the mugshots, and then republished them on six cloned mugshots websites, which I created by stealing their identities. The aim of this intervention was to protect the privacy of the ones affected by the public exposure of their booking data on those websites and especially on search engines, such as Google.
I injected noise in the search results, stealing traffic from the original mugshots websites to make the arrested harder to find and identify on the internet. However, my real aim was to make the affected aware of their rights, making a large public aware of the social consequences of making such data public, and I designed a privacy policy. In fact, Obscurity aimed to bring a privacy regulation called the Right to Be Forgotten to the United States, that took me years of advocacy, via a campaign I created, Right to Remove. With it, I created a broad awareness about such privacy rights, and legislators took it as an example for passing bills.
With the Right to Remove policy, I suggested specific types of sensitive personal data that should be removed from online search results to protect specific categories of vulnerable individuals. I received a lot of support for this campaign, especially from the mugshot extortion victims, and eventually I formed a community of activists advocating for the removal of online criminal records. For this action, I received legal threats from Mugshots.com, an anonymous firm in the Caribbean Island of Nevis, and US Data Ltd., a Texan firm owning a few mugshot websites.
MD & JS: In the series Sociality (2018), you documented more than 20,000 patents submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office that were designed to monitor and manipulate social behaviour. What did your analysis of these patents teach you about expected and unexpected ways we are being surveilled and controlled? Which of the patents stood out to you as particularly intrusive or abusive?
PC: This project looked particularly at the development of social networks. The patents I collected are from 2008 to 2018; during that timeframe, the internet changed from a tool for simply communicating and accessing information to a tool to surveil and influence people. Social media provided new and unprecedented methods and techniques to manipulate individuals in terms of marketing and advertising. That generated a gold rush in patenting any online technologies that could profile and then influence users. It started in early 2010 and continued until the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, a company that was revealed in 2018 to have used such technologies to manipulate voters, in particular during the Brexit referendum and the lead-up to the first Trump victory. Following that moment, several other whistleblowers from Google, Facebook and Twitter followed with similar revelations.
I intervened in that moment by investigating specific technologies, collecting and rating thousands of patents of algorithms, devices and interfaces. I then made a selection of controversial patents ordered in categories such as discrimination, polarization, addiction, deception, control, censorship and surveillance. I was shocked by my findings, there were plenty that were very disturbing, in a way surreal, coming from the minds of companies and engineers that had very little ethical concerns. They were not under any oversight.
My proposal was then to use the patents I found as evidence of abuse, and thus to advocate for the ban of those inventions, individually flagged and overseen by anyone, democratically. Reversing intellectual property into a tool for transparency and regulation.
Surveillance and profiling are directly connected to the technology of social manipulation. In fact, algorithms, devices and interfaces can manipulate social opinions and behaviours only by first intimately knowing everything about the individuals targeted to be manipulated. Personality, habits, tastes, connections, locations, demographics, purchases, everything is surveilled to profile individuals, to then feed them what they like individually and slowly pushing information that resonates for them but is also meant to shift their habits and opinions toward the manipulation aims.
Only after the project Sociality, the Patent Office established an Ethics committee that reviews the patents submitted to prevent abusive technologies from being accepted and published. However, companies use ‘trade secrets’ and ‘patent obfuscation’ to keep developing technology for manipulation, especially now, with the new AI gold rush. We are moving from a moment when ethics of information technology was completely not a thing to increasingly authoritarian states without any ethical concern, noticeably with Meta’s and X’s new approaches with the current Trump administration.
MD & JS: Various technologies, such as satellite imaging, drones, social media, ID technologies and AI have made state surveillance much more powerful over the past decades. However, several such tools have also empowered citizens: activists are organizing on social media, protesters film police brutality and use encrypted communication, citizen sleuths use a whole array of tools, including facial recognition, to investigate abuses of power. How do you feel about these critical or subversive uses of such technologies?
PC: I think in history there will always be a fight over the power to control society. There is always an asymmetry in this fight. In our era it’s played by digital technology. Hackers and activists can open black boxes, turn the cameras and surveillance tools on the power structures, challenging them to implement rules that would protect human rights and society at large. This is by necessity an endless fight; I don’t envision any great victory from either side. The only certain thing is the necessity to keep fighting.
MD & JS: Surveillance doesn’t have to be accurate to be effective; the suggestion is enough to cause a ‘chilling effect’ and self-censorship. Do you see signs that intensifying surveillance technology is changing social behaviour?
PC: We are definitely experiencing an intensification of technology for social control. With the advent of AI and more powerful computation, the techniques of surveillance and social manipulation are even greater. However, I want to stress that this is not only due to technological advancement, but that it’s especially a political and cultural issue. These instruments can be used against society because people lost faith in democratic institutions and in their own agency. The clear difference is now between the United States and the European Union, where politically and culturally, protecting privacy is considered more relevant.
This has also to do with how these questions are represented by artists and cultural producers. In my essay ‘Aesthetics of Information Ethics’, I briefly discuss the importance of avoiding art and writing that engages in falsehoods, hype, confusion, anxiety or fatalism around technology. Instead, it’s important to emphasize activism and advocacy for positive change, which is possible if its idea is kept alive.
MD & JS: The 2024 AI Act from the European Union bans untargeted scraping of internet or CCTV for facial images to build or expand databases. It also prohibits the use by law enforcement of real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces, such as facial recognition using CCTV. But it specifies several exceptions for the latter. What are your thoughts on this attempt to enforce regulation?
PC: I’m for sure glad that the AI Act was enacted in Europe, it has been a very great success after years of activism. For my campaign to ban facial recognition technology in Europe, I got several organisations involved that were already trying to regulate biometrics. My petition had over fifty thousand signatures and I received large press coverage through the art intervention Capture in France. The European Commission answered me directly, thanking me for promoting such regulation, which they were working on and enacted a year later, with the AI Act.
There are still several limitations to the regulation of biometrics of the AI Act. In particular, I think that it came a little too late, as now, with new forms of AI systems, biometrics is almost outdated. AI today can observe other types of details, such as clothing or behaviour, about individuals and their environments. For example, in the context of the 2024 Olympics in France it was remarkable to observe how authorities and companies dedicated to developing surveillance tools had co-opted the language of ethical practices and regulations. They asserted that they didn’t plan to use biometric surveillance, which was an unthinkable statement until very recently. However, simultaneously, they introduced new predictive technologies able to monitor objects, moments and behaviours, arguing that they are not as dangerous and ensuring that they will maintain control over the masses only with these technologies.
Based on my observations, these emerging predictive technologies can be even more powerful than biometrics. While they may not directly analyse facial features, they focus on details such as behavioural patterns, and with AI they process multiple data points simultaneously from different contextual dimensions. Even without direct identification, individuals are subjected to heightened scrutiny with AI systems. As long as a name or surname is not linked to the data, anonymity is maintained. However, the level of surveillance has increased compared to previous methods, enabling new forms of profiling, even without using facial recognition and biometrics, thanks to new AI models.
I don’t think there is an end in the struggle between new technological capabilities of social control and the fight to regulate or ban it. This is something we need to fight for, as much as people fight to aim for democracy and freedom.
MD & JS: You have called facial recognition (FR) a ‘particularly invasive technology’ that poses an enormous danger to democratic freedoms, civil liberties and free expression. How is FR different from other surveillance technologies? Is there something specific about its technical power, or about the cultural and/or social significance of the face?
PC: First of all, a face is difficult to hide, as it is the core of ourselves and of our identity.
There are several technologies that are highly invasive of privacy, especially with biometrics. Among them, Facial Recognition is particularly violating and biased. Faces carry social meanings. Faces are the most public parts of humans and their traits serve as the metrics for social judgment. I consider Facial Recognition too dangerous for citizens as it can turn one of our main means of sociality against us, turning our faces into tracking devices rather than the core component of ourselves.
Facial Recognition infringes upon the right to dignity as it uses people’s own qualities, behaviours, emotions or characteristics against them in ways that are not justified or proportionate to the EU’s fundamental rights or for individual national laws.
Much like nuclear or chemical weapons, Facial Recognition poses a great threat to humanity. Its use for identification and profiling is certainly too dangerous to be used at all. It should be banned not only by the European Union but also globally by the United Nations.
Facial Recognition is a particularly invasive technology. It’s not only about the surveillance of activists, suspects and minorities, but it is an invasion of privacy for everyone and an enormous danger to democratic freedoms, civil liberties and free expression for the whole society.
Also, it is about how this technology becomes culturally pervasive and normalized, ultimately inducing fear in everyone’s life. It creates a false sense that being watched and analysed at all times is acceptable and creates societies filled with suspicion, abuse and mistrust.
MD & JS: Surveillance is often used as a synonym for state surveillance. However, many recent powerful surveillance technologies were developed by companies, such as Pegasus and Clearview AI. How do you see this trend and what does this mean for the kind of criticism you engage in? For instance, if you made Overexposed today, would it feature big business and tech CEOs?
PC: This is an important point missing in several analyses and also artworks concerning privacy. Corporate surveillance is surely more pervasive than state surveillance these days, and yet very little is being done, and there is very little discussion about it. Look at our phones: they are surveilling us constantly, more than anything, and with our consent. Everything they collect is in the hands of a few companies. That’s why these companies lobby so hard against privacy regulations when governments would actually enact them.
This misconception is due to an antiquated mindset built by literature and cultural references. In particular, U.S. culture is programmed to fear the government, but not corporations. In Europe, we first fear the American corporations. On the other hand, these corporations influence the cultural world to find legitimacy, influence and lobby. Consequentially, there are artists, curators and art centres taking corporate sponsorships, or even working within the companies, to then produce just bad art and commentary that fits corporate propaganda and hides widespread abuse on privacy as human rights.
I’ve done many projects about and against specific companies, including their CEOs, and I’m very rarely invited to talk or show those works, which makes me think what the responsibility of curators and academics is in this question.
MD & JS: Your recent project Resurrect (2024) focuses on the role of Western imperialism and colonialism and the dynamics of unequal power relations. How do AI and surveillance technology impact such relations on a global scale?
PC: In the project Resurrect, I used artificial intelligence to appropriate the legacy of dead war mercenaries. I created AI-cloned mercenaries from the Congo Crisis in the 1960s who are still glorified in online communities, the media and the military despite their involvement in overthrowing democracy, in massacres and the killing of a Secretary General of the United Nations. As an internet performance, I then infiltrated online communities of war enthusiasts with the mercenaries’ video monologues. The mercenaries make antimilitarist statements, regretting their complicity in crimes against humanity in the name of imperialism and colonialism.
The project used AI to generate videos of the mercenaries with their original voices and faces. They confess on social media, revealing their true nature and guilt, expressing regret for their actions and roles. The conscience of these individuals is recreated with AI, and their subconscious speaks as it could never have when they were alive. I used archive photos and videos of the mercenaries, as well as their writing and biography, and then I authored their new lives as resurrected soldiers. I used deepfake technology to animate them and used ChatGPT to make them reflect on their lives and actions.
I think that with AI, the control over narratives will create social conflicts over new forms of censorship and manufacturing reality. In this project, AI refers to autonomous soldiers, weapons and cyber warfare tactics for spreading sensitive information and propaganda.
Moreover, this project also refers to the ongoing conflict in Congo, still driven by mercenary forces, resulting in many deaths, political assassinations, and fuelled by colonial interests in the mining of rare minerals used in high-tech industries, including AI. Cobalt and coltan are primarily extracted in Congo, where illegal mining controlled by mercenaries fuels a brutal conflict. Today, most smartphones and computers contain these minerals, which are smuggled out of Congo. That’s how, in this project, artificial intelligence is haunted by the ghosts of bloody neocolonialism and extractivism.
MD & JS: Recently, Big Tech has been playing a very visible role in the U.S. government: tech CEOs courting president Trump’s favour; Elon Musk heading the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, DOGE; the Trump administration awarding large government contracts to surveillance company Palantir… Do you see this as a continuation of a longer trend, or has something shifted significantly?
PC: It is a consolidation of power. Several times in history, U.S. corporations worked together with the government toward political agendas. For boosting Wall Street, mining companies and other industries, we saw deregulation in finance, international trade deals, polluting permits and so on. Now the same consolidation is happening with Silicon Valley.
However, I do think this significantly increases our awareness of the capabilities that these new technologies can have in politics. It’s a moment of awakening. Major Silicon Valley firms have a dominant position and they can benefit from an authoritarian political regime. On the other hand, just like in China and Russia, tech companies cannot exist without permission from the authorities, so it’s not surprising that all American Big Tech companies had to stand behind the new authoritarian Trump administration.
In 2012, I made the project Persecuting US by profiling one million Americans on Twitter, based on their political preferences. It was during the presidential elections between Obama and Romney. I wanted to demonstrate how these social media platforms could be used not just to profile voters, but also to engage them in what you could call a digital civil war over opinions that could be amplified and manipulated through these platforms. It was a big provocation that actually went mostly unnoticed, much like the dangers I was pointing out with this project.
Today, just a decade later, we see the ultimate consequence of these technologies in politics. And so, in mid-2024, I worked again on Twitter, now called X by Elon Musk. I proposed to ban it completely, considering it is a medium that has become too dangerous for everyone. For one year, I promoted my BAN X in EU campaign anonymously in an artistic and activist attempt to address the Digital Services Act (DSA) regulation for online disinformation in Europe. Yet, since banning a platform sounded like a form of censorship, I faced hostility and misunderstanding from haters, but also from friends and colleagues, just for promoting something anyone with common sense would agree on today. In fact, the project was mostly a philosophical reflection on free speech in times of abusive AI and social media platforms. I think that the current cultural perception of free speech is antiquated and doesn’t consider how, as of today, speech can be weaponized in such powerful ways.
Today we are facing Tech Fascism. So, the banning of platforms like X is about banning fascism’s ability to gain influence in society with a combination of online surveillance and misleading content that enables a hyper-tailored manipulation of citizens. Nevertheless, the European Commission has been soft on enforcing the DSA regulations on Big Tech to maintain diplomacy with the United States, which is meanwhile aggressively attacking legacy media with lawsuits, by slashing funding and through AI content. In the end, social reality is made of complex geopolitics, imperialist agendas, mass control of citizens and a cultural hegemony that is difficult to overcome in the face of superpower objectives.
Therefore, my efforts might be just utopian attempts to remove disinformation and misinformation, stop citizen profiling and eventually ban entire media platforms. In reality, that would require people and voters to be free and well-informed, which still represents an unfinished utopia for human civilizations.
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