The transparency grenade.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Artifact - Data storage material - Brief article

IT'S USUALLY not a good idea to pull the pin out of a grenade in the middle of a meeting. But this resin and sterling silver replica of a Soviet FI hand grenade isn't ordinary ordinance.

Designed to instantly and anonymously publicize what's going on in closed-door meetings or other secret confabs, the hardware-stuffed Transparency Grenade releases a burst of data when activated. Audio files, network traffic, and location information are streamed to a dedicated server, where useful fragments like email messages and voice recordings are harvested and displayed on a map. The idea, creator and artist Julian Oliver told the blog We Make Money Not Art, is to enable "network-leveraged leaking" by deploying a "functional weapon in a...