TRY IT ON A CLIMATE-SCIENCE DEPARTMENT OR NEWSROOM NEAR YOU: A “Transparency Grenade” for would-be Bradley Mannings.

“Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna,” Oliver explains on the Transparency Grenade site, “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.” The notion is that you might be a civil servant outraged at what your department or agency is keeping hidden from the world. You storm into a meeting, pull the pin, and boom! It’s a data leak detonation.

I was expecting an earth-shattering kaboom. But wait, there’s more: “He says on his site that he’s working on an app for rooted Android devices that will mimic the grenade’s functionality while running stealthily on the background of users’ phones.”