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)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Gadgets • security • surveillance • transparency

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Warren_Terra

I’m sure it’s very clever commentary about the colloquial meaning of “throwing grenades” and all that, but there are all sorts of reasons that hiding a “grenade-shaped device” in what is meant to be a secure room containing your ideological opponents isn’t actually all that clever.
- Lobster
  
  First and foremost that it’s the opposite of discreet. It’s a glowing weapon. What do they expect, their target to look at it and say, “oops, Bill left one of his cybergrenades behind again. Oh, that guy. He’s wacky.”
Pag

If the rooms are actually smoke-filled, I’m not sure putting a camera in them will help…
Daemonworks

While I appreciate the artistic sentiment, I have to think it would be more effective to disguise it as a hardcover book or some other innocuous device.
- Lobster
  
  Like an animatronic furious honey badger, of course, brilliant!
  - Felton / Moderator
    
    Thanks for making my day with the words “animatronic furious honey badger.”
IndexMe

And even after all of the above, carrying an object that looks so much like a weapon that even an expert would be hard-put to answer is a good way to get shot and/or locked away? And ruin your life forever and ever? Dumb.
- Clevername
  
  Well, I don’t think that the real F1 grenades are translucent glowing blue.