Paolo Cirio

Paolo Cirio is a conceptual artist, hacktivist and cultural critic.

Cirio's work embodies hacker ethics, such as open access, privacy policies, and the critique of economic, legal, and political models. He has proposed improved public policies in such fields through activist campaigns. He has received a number of legal threats for his Internet art performances, which include practices such as hacking, piracy, leaking sensitive information, identity theft, and cyber attacks. Paolo has been awarded the first prize at Ars Electronica in 2014 by the Golden Nica and the Eyebeam Fellowship in 2012, among other recognitions.

Paolo Cirio is known for having exposed over 200,000 Cayman Islands offshore firms with the work Loophole for All[1] in 2013; the hacking of Facebook through publishing 1 million users on a dating website with Face to Facebook in 2011[2] ; the theft of 60,000 financial news articles with Daily Paywall[3] in 2014 and of e-books from Amazon.com with Amazon Noir[4] in 2006; defrauding Google with GWEI[5] in 2005; and the obfuscation of 15 million U.S. criminal records with Obscurity[6] in 2016; exposing over 20,000 patents of technology enabling social manipulation with Sociality in 2018[7]. Recently, in 2020, he pirated over 100,000 Sotheby’s auction records in Derivatives[8] and he attempted to profile 4000 French police officers with facial recognition in Capture.[9] His early works include his cyber attacks against NATO and reporting on its military operations since 2001 [10].