Artist Julian Oliver has put together a "transparency grenade" that lets users leak information from closed meetings by just pulling a pin.
[partner id="wireduk"] The grenade includes a computer with a microphones and powerful wireless antenna that captures network traffic and audio in a locations and anonymously streams it to an external server that mines it for information -- including e-mail excerpts, web pages, images and voice. The server then uploads that data to a public website and positions it on a map.
The body is the shape of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, made out of the sturdy Tusk2700T resin. The metal parts are created from silver, complete with an operational trigger mechanism that begins the recording process. "I wanted it to look elegant, a bottle of high-class perfume, as much as a weapon," said Oliver in an interview with We Make Money, Not Art.
Inside, there's a a "Gumstix" ARM Cortex-A8 computer, Arduino Nano, LED Bargraph (for wireless signal level), 802.11 board antenna, 3.7-volt battery, 64x32 pixel LCD RGB display, 5mm cardioid microphones and an 8 GB microSD card. The computer runs a modified GNU/Linux embedded operating system.
Oliver added: "The volatility of information in networked, digital contexts itself frames a precedent for clamoring (and often unrealistic) attempts to contain it. One could even say it's this desperate fear of the leak that produces images like my grenade, images that will continue to take violent forms in popular culture, journalism and presidential speeches in time."
Oliver says that he's also working on a version of the grenade's functionality that's a little more subtle -- it uses a rooted androids phones to achieve the same aims. "This will allow activists (or those simply sick of the relative opacity of their organization) to deploy Transparency Grenade-like functionality on their rooted androids phones and send the data over an encrypted channel via their GSM provider to a publicly available map, displaying the detonation as data from that site," he said.
You can see the Transparency Grenade in the Weise7 Studio exhibition in Labor Berlin, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, until Feb. 20, 2012. View more images in Wired UK's Transparency Grenade gallery.
