He received a number of legal threats for his Internet art performances, including practices such as hacking, piracy, leaking sensitive information, identity theft, and cyber attacks.
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; the theft of 60,000 financial news articles with Daily Paywall[2] in 2014 and of e-books from Amazon.com with Amazon Noir[3] in 2006; defrauding Google with GWEI[4] in 2005; and the obfuscation of 15 million U.S. criminal records with Obscurity[5] in 2016; exposing over 20,000 patents of technology enabling social manipulation in 2018.
Cirio has exhibited in international museums and institutions, he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading universities, and his artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets worldwide.
[8] In collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen, Cirio created the project Amazon Noir to criticize the abuse of copyright laws for digital content misappropriated by private corporations.
[9][10] Between 2008 and 2010, Cirio worked on experimental storytelling, involving actors and audiences to present real facts and issues through fictional stories across multiple media platforms.
Cirio issued thousands of illicit VISA credit cards[12] to design a creative monetary policy, named "Gift Finance", which is a participatory and interest-free basic income guarantee system.
Since 2011, Cirio has been addressing the cultural shift and mainstream media attention toward popular perceptions of privacy and ownership of public and personal information, with the projects Street Ghosts, Persecuting.US, and Face to Facebook.
The project made public the list of all the companies registered in the Cayman Islands for the first time, exposing tax evasion practices by counterfeiting Certificate of Incorporation documents signed with his name.
In 2014, Cirio created the Global Direct project, a creative political philosophy that the artist outlined for worldwide participatory democracy within the potentials offered by the Internet.
After a few days, the ISP hosting DailyPaywall.com disabled the site after receiving complaints of international Copyright infringement from Pearson PLC, the education and publisher company and owner of the Financial Times and The Economist.
He disseminated on public walls unauthorized photos of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials of the NSA, CIA and FBI, who were accountable for political measures or advocacy for mass surveillance and espionage programs.
The photos, mostly selfies from Facebook and Twitter accounts of civilians, were rendered with a particular technique called High Definition Stencils invented by the artist for the street art campaign that took place in NYC, London, Berlin and Paris between April and May 2015.
The intervention generated media coverage and public interest internationally and particularly in Germany [21] [22][23][24] in connection to the German Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA spying scandal.
In 2016, Cirio created the project Obscurity in which he obfuscated over 10 million online mugshots and the criminal records of victims of mass incarceration in United States.
The project addressed the unregulated mug shot publishing industry that anonymous internet companies exploit in order to shame and blackmail people who have been arrested in the U.S. regardless of their charges and trial verdicts.
Ultimately, to point out the accountability of search engines in exposing personal sensitive information, Cirio designed the campaign Right2Remove.us [12] to introduce a privacy policy adapting the Right to Be Forgotten law to the United States.
A selection of patents ordered by categories such as discrimination, polarization, addiction, deception, control, censorship, and surveillance were published on The Coloring Book of Technology for Social Manipulation [16].
On the project’s website, visitors are invited to share, flag, and ban these patents in relation to the regulation of the information technology for monitoring and manipulating social behaviors.
This project responded to the scandals of Cambridge Analytica and Youtube algorithms that broke in 2018 and broadly it documents the history of the Internet with the advent of targeted advertising, corporate surveillance, and information feed filtered by artificial intelligence.
Cirio collected hundreds of photos by online influencers promoting controversial products without disclaimers and in partnership with the University of Maastricht he investigated the legal implications of moderating and regulating such subtle advertising.
[25][26] In response the interior minister Gérald Darmanin and police unions forced the take down of the project both online and at the exhibition in the French art institution Le Fresnoy.
[31] In 2021, Cirio concluded the campaign to ban facial recognition technology in Europe by delivering his legal research and complaint to the European Commission and EDPS with over 50,000 signatures supporting his petition.
[32] On October 9, 2021, Cirio established the first international climate crime tribunal though a solo exhibition at the historical museum of Certosa di San Giacomo in Capri.