Introduction
The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.
Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.
Whether trusted employee, civil servant or concerned citizen, greater openness was never so close at hand..
Details
This is a one-off object created in January 2012 by Julian Oliver for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, curated by Transmediale 2012 Director, Kristoffer Gansing.The core concept will continue to live on as an application for Android devices and server-side software. See the section Android application below for more..
The body is made of Tusk2700T, a highly resilient translucent resin, printed from a stereo-lithography model made by CAD designer Ralph Witthuhn based on a replica Soviet F1 Hand Grenade. Metal parts were hand-crafted from 925/1000 sterling silver by Susanne Stauch, complete with operational trigger mechanism, screw-on locking caps and engraving.
The components include a 'Gumstix' ARM Cortex-A8 computer with expansion board, Arduino Nano (for SPI display control), LED Bargraph (for wireless signal level, controlled by GPIO pin outs from Overo COM), powerful 802.11 board antenna, 3.7v battery, 64x32 pixel LCD RGB display (harvested from NKK 'SmartSwitch), 5mm cardioid microphone and an 8Gb MicroSD card. The computer runs a modified Angstrom OS, a GNU/Linux embedded operating system popular on ARM devices.
The grenade prior to assembly
The electronics studio
Note the expansion board 'Pinto-TH' pictured is not used in the final grenade.
The metalworking studio
The design
Browser-based map interface to Transparency Detonations
Android application
Thanks to a generous donation from Scott Robinson (@quadhome), development of an Android application is underway, for rooted Android devices. This will mimic some of the functionality of the grenade, with the TG program running 'invisibly' on their phone as a backgrounded application. A GUI will be provided for configuration. It will allow upload using a 2048 bit SSH tunnel over the user's own 4G connection, automatically determining the location via the device's own GPS system and using this to position the 'detonation' on the map interface. Naturally this is a little more practical than walking into a meeting with a grenade in your jacket pocket.
Due to legal concerns the author will not provide a server for using this application. However, all code will be published for study and so that others can set up their own service, should they find a worthy need for it.
Software development tools used
Any work done on the software side of the Transparency Grenade was done on a laptop running Debian Stable. Programming was done using the IDE VIM. Minicom was used for serial communications using a USB Serial FTDI from Sparkfun electronics.Donations
I greatly welcome donations to help get this Android project finished, tested and ready to install on your phones as soon as possible. Hosting is also going to be expensive as there seems to be a great deal of interest around the project. I can guarantee all donations will be anonymous and not communicated to any third party.I don't use PayPal. If you'd like to donate, please get in contact by writing me an email here:
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