Shaming Spy Chiefs by Plastering Them All Over the World

• • LAURA MALLONEE
• 
  
• YOU’VE HEARD OF Edward Snowden. And the name Keith Alexander probably rings a bell. But what about James Comey? As head of the FBI, he pressed for a law that would require American smartphone companies to decrypt citizens’ phones on request. Ever heard of Avril Haines? She was deputy director of the CIA when that agency was engaged in many of the activities Snowden exposed.
  Italian artist Paolo Cirio has been stenciling “unauthorized” portraits of these folks, and six other high-ranking officials at three-letter agencies, on walls throughout cities around the world. This rogue’s gallery of spooks and spies grin unwittingly from posters and murals in places more typically reserved for television stars and lingerie models.
  “I find it interesting to turn these intelligence officials into pop celebrities, bringing them from the dark of top secrecy programs to the spotlight of the art circus,” Cirio says.

  Click to Open Overlay Gallery

  Posters from Overexposed in Berlin.  PAOLO CIRIO

  Some of the people he singles out are more famous—infamous?—than others. Michael Hayden led the NSA when it created its notorious bulk data collection program. Alexander presided over the National Security Agency when, among many other things, it launched PRISM, the surveillance program Snowden risked so much to expose. He also led US Cyber Command. James Clapper was director of national intelligence.
  All of these people were architects, or at least overseers, of the vast surveillance apparatus that Snowden exposed. He’s been forced into exile in Russia, while many of these people still pull the levers of power. Cirio sees these portraits as a way to shame, if not punish, them by denying them the anonymity their agencies seem happy to take from us.
  The artist, whose previous work has angered more than a few multinational corporations, The Financial Times  andFacebook — bases them on personal, sometimes private photos. He finds them on social media using open-source intelligence—data easily obtained from social media, public records and other easily obtained info. Plugins like Photo Hack for Facebook can reveal selfies and other candid photographs. (Interestingly, these tools are far less effective against British intelligence officials, who seem to be a bit more cautious than their US counterparts.)
  Next, Cirio runs the images through a custom script that converts them into files compatible with a laser cutter. He then prints four stencils for each person, each perforated with hundreds of tiny triangles reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots. Layered together with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black acrylic spray paint, they form immaculate reproductions of the subjects’ faces.
  The resulting portraits look like pop silkscreens from the 1960s, an eye-candy aesthetic that belies their serious undertone. “These are portraits of high-ranking war generals, the Napoleons of today, somehow marking their historical role in attempting to build a dangerous cyber-empire,” Cirio says. But beyond bringing these people out of the shadows, the artists wants them to know that, despite their job titles, they’re as digitally vulnerable and overexposed as the rest of us.
  Paolo Cirio’s Overexposed is on display at Nome until July 20.
  AUTHOR: LAURA MALLONEE.
• http://www.wired.com/2015/07/shaming-spy-chiefs-plastering-world/