Transparency Grenade: a grenade-shaped surveillance device for smoke-filled rooms
Julian Oliver's "Transparency Grenade" is a surveillance device shaped like a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, stuffed with network sniffers and other technology. It is intended to be hidden in smoke-filled rooms where secretive and corrupt meetings are taking place, so that all the material therein can be widely viewed.
Most importantly however it is the hyperbole and fear around containing these volatile records, of the cyber burglary, that increasingly yields assumptive logics that ultimately shape how we use networks and think about the right to information. Just as record companies claim billions in losses due to file sharing, the fear of the leak is being actively exploited by law makers to afford organisations greater opacity and thus control.
This anxiety, this 'network insecurity', impacts not just upon the freedom of speech but the felt instinct to speak at all. All of a sudden letting public know what's going on inside a publicly funded organisation is somehow 'wrong' -Bradley Manning a sacrificial lamb to that effect. Meanwhile civil servants and publicly-owned companies continue to make decisions behind guarded doors that impact the lives of many, whether human or other animal.
The Transparency Grenade (We Make Money Not Art)
Transparency Grenade (project page)
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