Secrecy filmmakers Robb Moss and Peter Galison, Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project creator Hasan Elahi, and I agreed to talk recently to discuss their work, but Elahi didn’t phone in to our conference call at the appointed time. No problem: We simply went to his website Tracking Transience and traced his location, which appeared to be at an intersection near a bridge. He eventually made his way to the call, and a great conversation ensued about the two works, which touch on many of the same issues. Moss and Galison’s documentary Secrecy examines the increasing number of “classified” documents and asks what this level of governmental secrecy means to us as a nation. Elahi’s Tracking Transience, which reveals the artist’s location in real time, all the time, was built in response to the FBI’s surveillance of the artist based on their ill-founded interest in him as a terrorist.

Galison: One of the things that interested me in your work is the ambiguity of tone that surrounds what you do – in one sense you’re saying, “Okay, FBI, here’s what you wanted. I’ll give you all this and a thousand times more, and both disclose but also put in the critical foreground what it means to have all of this information out there.” How do you think about what this disclosure means?

Elahi: Well, it’s exactly what’s in your film. You have the former NSA guys who say, “We don’t mind disclosing information to honest Americans, but the bad guys will get their hands on it so we need to keep it secret,” and then you have folks saying that by having all of this out there, the information loses its power. I think there’s a beautiful relationship between disclosing and revealing, and how you can actually do both with the identical information.

Moss: There’s a Dashiell Hammett story in which the bad guys capture the Continental Op, and they put him on a horse, but he can’t ride, so he falls off, and they laugh at him. Then he gets back on the horse, falls off, and gets back on again, and this goes on about a dozen times until they are begging him not to get on the horse. He somehow turns their energy against them in this martial arts move where he absorbs and reflects their energy back at them. You’re doing the same thing. You’re taking all of that energy and instead of putting up the usual fight, you’re absorbing it and reflecting it back, and the entire power apparatus changes as you do that. I'm wondering if it feels like that to you?

Elahi: Yes, I’m giving them what they want, but that much detail defeats their purpose. But a lot of my project is about understanding how intelligence operates. I think this is the nature of the intelligence system where you have bits of information, and you have to piece it all together, but they’re doing it in this totally old-fashioned way.

Galison: One of the things that struck Robb and me is that we have two figures, Tom Blanton, who is the Director of the National Security Archive [which publishes declassified documents], and then Melissa Maley, who’s from the CIA, and they come from very different perspectives but they end up saying something very close, which is that we used to handle information in the Cold War in a need-to-know, compartmentalized, linear way. But now, with Web-based, distributed information, the world has changed dramatically in the way information flows. And we need to understand that.

Elahi: You’re exactly dead-on. The mentality of a lot of our intelligence is still based on the Industrial Age, as clearly stated in your film. But the thing that I’m interested in now is not Big Brother but Little Brothers. Everyone has a cell phone. Everyone has a camera. Every transaction is logged. So what’s happening now is that we have not these fancy surveillance devices but regular household pieces of technology that are doing things in a way that we haven’t even begun to process.

Galison: One thing that interests me is the way you, Robb, and I try to visualize things that are really quite abstract. In order to communicate things, we rely on kinds of visualization, including animation, and in a sense, you are doing the same thing, visualizing a specific aspect of surveillance.

Moss: For us, though, one big question is how do you know what you don’t know? In our case, with a film about secrecy, there’s no way to know what’s not being disclosed to us. And the same is true for you; you’re filling the space you don’t know with all of these details. So for us, we’re trying to feel the contours of these secrets from the outside-in, and you are on the inside creating this wallpaper around an edifice that you can’t see. That to me is very interesting.