Transparency grenade

Artist Julian Oliver has put together a “transparency grenade” that lets users leak information from closed meetings by just pulling the pin.

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.

The grenade includes a computer with a microphone and powerful wireless antenna that captures network traffic and audio in a location 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.

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, 64×32 pixel LCD RGB display, 5mm cardioid microphone 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 clamouring (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 Android phone 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 Android phone 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.

An exploded view of the Transparency Grenade.
Photo: Julian Oliver