How to Make and Use a Transparency Grenade | Hacker News Reader

How to Make and Use a Transparency Grenade

transparencygrenade.com

157 pointstokenadult38 comments

Honestly, if you bring this into a government area, then you will probably get shot on sight if you are seen by security. To be safer and a little bit more stealthy, maybe try disguising it as a soda can or a door stop.

It's an art piece, not a serious piece of espionage equipment, hence its form reflects its (symbolic) function.

I don't think armed guards see the silhouette of a grenade, a device that can maim, wound, injure or worse kill a number of people in the terms of "espionage".

I think you've missed the point

If any security personal saw a transparent plastic flashing light shaped like a grenade they'd likely write it off as a trinket.

I had the impression this was a bit of a joke, for that reason. "No sir don't mind me while I pull the pin on this grenade here, continue with the meeting."

The android app for rooted phones is a great idea though. That's much easier to run in promiscuous mode and sneak past everybody.

I like the android app too. My comment was more of a "Please don't get shot" type of thing. I really like it when artists who do this sort of work stay alive.

If there's a list of things NOT to ever make a joke about it in public, then near the top of the list would be combat explosives.

Nothing is off limits for art exhibits.

One man walks up to another, pulls out a gun, fires and kills the other. When apprehended, he says, "But... I'm an artist!"

Clearly, some things are off limits for art exhibits.

The portrayal of such an act could clearly be art. You are just being absurd.

I think that depends on which government we would be talking about. I don't think they all shoot people on sight.

I think that depends on which government we would be talking about.

How much judicial process a person would get, and whether the person with the transparency grenade would be killed with or without judicial process, would indeed vary from one government to another. But it would be a rare government that would forget about searching people thought to have grenades with them in secure areas as a CONSISTENT practice. (Counterexamples to what I just wrote: A confidant of Hitler was able to bring a briefcase containing a bomb into a meeting with Hitler.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20/new...

A group of CIA operatives were assassinated by a person they believed to be an informant, who was actually a Taliban double agent.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126225941186711671.html

So maybe someone attempting to penetrate a secure area, especially a trusted person, might get lucky bringing in a transparency grenade, even in the artist's intentionally provocative form. But in the general case, it is probably wiser to use better tradecraft and disguise the spying device as something harmless that belongs in the secure area.)

The more serious suggestion in the page submitted here is that perhaps we can all live a little more freely if only we can find out what is being deliberated by the most secretive regimes, the regimes from whose territories we most rarely see posts on Hacker News.

Not that it has any connection to the thread but you missed my favourite: leader of the Northern Alliance assassinated by two fake reporters with the bomb hidden in a video camera on 9/9/01

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shah_Massoud#Assassinatio...

If you are seen pulling the pin from a grenade, you're likely to be shot on sight.

I have wondered for some time what the effect would be of the following transparency experiment:

With an experienced investigative journalist as a mentor, "deploy" a handful of young journalists to report via a blog-esque medium on the politics of some randomly chosen small city. What would happen if every police incident was investigated to find out if the powerful were granted special treatment? If every claim made in a city council meeting was verified? If every motive behind every vote was examined? How about tracing down budget expenditures to see who was scheming to defraud taxpayers? Would the city's citizens care enough to even read the blog? Would this transparency change government for the better? It certainly would give Americans a baseline for the level of corruption and inefficiency in local governments.

The act of measuring would change the behavior. In this way, transparency activism suffers the same phenomenon as security: doing the job right yields an environment in which there is no apparent need for doing the job right.

Interesting point. I wonder what graph of oversight level vs. corruption level looks like. I'm sure the point of diminishing returns occurs at only 1/10th a dedicated journalist. However, the marginal societal value (cost of corruption compared to cost of oversight) might continue to be positive for awhile as investigators are added.

The need is perfectly apparent to those who read history and political philosophy.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- but this sentiment is inconvenient to any number of political projects, both right and left, and so frowned upon as unconstructive and paranoid.

There are a few programs in the U.S. that do that. I got to be part of one back in 2007, News 21, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. To your point, just having someone from the outside skeptically examining official claims led to people losing their jobs: http://newsinitiative.org/story/2007/08/28/holy_land_experie...

That's the follow-on piece to a longer story that's apparently only readable in raw HTML now:

http://newsinitiative.org/story/2007/08/23/the_holy_land_exp...

It didn't take much for the leadership change to happen there. I read a few stories about the place getting acquired by a T.V. network with a bad reputation. I interviewed as many people as I could by phone over a few weeks. Then I flew there and spent 3 days wandering the park interviewing as many people as I could. Then I wrote out the story they had told me and my editors worked it over a bit to help it hang together better. When it was published, it didn't seem like I'd actually found anything terribly interesting.

However the simple fact of stitching everyone's testimonies together was enough to show that the company's leaders weren't all telling the story people thought they were, and that led to the ouster.

The News21 program recruited about 100 graduate journalism students, gave us each $7500, and had us report on very narrow topics for 3 months. My team was assigned to "religion and public life" and while this was a private theme park, it was a place where religious themes were displayed very openly. Others in our group went to Mount Rushmore for 4th of July, which is apparently a very religious affair, the Mormon pagaents in upstate NYC, and so on.

Fascinating that you've actually done this! What is sad to me is how little effort was required to bring about this level of transparency. I'm not suggesting that you did not work hard on this series, but it's not like 10 investigators spent a year interviewing everyone possibly connected. Perhaps the bright side is that you've demonstrated the potential upside of non-profit transparency work by showing how low-hanging the fruit might be.

Even among well-respected government institutions, requiring real answers to real questions is regarded as a little bit rude. The sophisticated ones will suffer it, knowing such questioners don't really matter much. But the people asking the questions are never brought "inside" to where the real decisions get made.

If there were more people asking real questions, and more higher placed and public people, it would get a lot harder to sideline such gadflies.

The real shame is that our institutions and culture could rise to a higher standard if required to. Today's concessions to political "necessity" forestall tomorrow's advance to systems that actually work.

I doubt it would change much. It's hard to get politicans to make statments that can be falsified. Watch some episodes of the brilliant "Yes Minster" to see what I mean.

"Well, in the fullness of time, given the most up to date information, subject to the findings of the interdepartmental crossparty study group, and dependant on the budgetry contrainsts, I believe something to be likely to be the type of programme that would, given there are no unforeseen circumstances, lead to positive net job growth"

We need the ability to broadcast from our smartphones to be an intrinsic, built-in feature. To that end, I am currently working on apps for iOS and Android that will make it very, very easy for people to stream media in realtime from wherever they are ..

This transparency grenade is definitely a step in the right direction towards educating people why we need such features in our smartphones. I commend the artist for using the appropriate level of symbolism to communicate the dire need for individual abilities such as this.

I wonder how hard it would be to set up a server running Skype, which just auto-accepts incoming video calls and dumps them to YouTube...

Incidentally, the artist who made this (Julian Oliver) is part of a free technology workshop series aimed at artists who don't necessarily have a technical background, which may be interesting if you know any people in Berlin meeting that description: http://weise7.org/labor-berlin-8-workshops

The creator, Julian Oliver, is also one of the guys responsible for the "Newstweek" (http://newstweek.com/overview) device that was on hacker news about a year ago.

Originally presented by a fake news article about one being discovered, it's a pretty neat device. Basically just a plug computer that you hide near a public AP which then mitm's all the AP's web traffic and according to a set of rules rewrites news headlines.

I will argue that there is no need for a 200 dollar Gumstix ARM Cortex A8 in there. Not even close.

A 16-bit microcontroller (< 5 USD) would pull it off, but you'd need to custom code most of the software to power that.

Unless it only takes you an hour or two to whip up the entire network stack including the crypto I think it's pretty cost-effective to splurge on the processor that can run linux.

> A 16-bit microcontroller (< 5 USD) would pull it off, but you'd need to custom code most of the software to power that.

So it's an engineering trade-off: You "don't need" something complex, not at all, nope (but if you use the "simpler" solution, other parts become more complex as a result).

I've noticed this multiple times before, and it annoys me: "Simpler" is not always better; in fact, it isn't even always simpler!

I don't mean to jump on you in specific, but this idea does come up again and again, often in places like Hacker News.

I completely agree - except this is a hobby project, not something serious in the first place. If you're hand-tooling the metal parts for the grenade, CAD designing the parts, and machining them or 3D printing them, it would seem that novelty is the factor.

If you can save 100-150 bucks while increasing the cool factor and having a more fulfilling rewarding experience (like you said, this is Hacker News, after all), why not?

$150 does not seem worth whatever effort would be required to custom code most of the software. Especially for a one-off art piece. I think the goal is to make it functional and aesthetically pleasing, and that's what makes it a fulfilling experience for the artist.

But I still think an ARM processor running Linux is way cooler than a silly micro-controller! We should vote.

So what you're saying is that you should save the 10$ from the 15$ you pay for a Cortex and instead spend many many days to end up with a outlandishly slow solution?

I take it this is supposed to inspect network traffic, at some point you need some raw throughput.

I don't know where you got those numbers from. The savings difference (after buying the needed hardware for networking, etc. for the non-comprehensive solution) would be along the lines of a hundred dollars (if not closer to 150).

If they were interested in saving money for it's own sake, they wouldn't have bothered using sterling silver for the metal parts.

I think we should deploy a few of these in the editorial meeting rooms of some of the worlds top media conglomerates and news papers.

But in all seriousness, don't deploy these anywhere. You may get shot on sight.

Overall cool idea, and I respect anyone who makes such a thing from a craft perspective. But the decision to make it look like a grenade was extremely unwise and arguably dangerously stupid. Walk into a building with a large number of people who don't know you, and the odds are one of them will see it and freak out, leading to a police/security encounter or worse.

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