When data gets set into stone: Malta's 'dead drop' at Msida skater park

'Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. Wikipedia calls it "a location used to secretly pass items between two people, without requiring them to meet."

The dead drop pictured here was left in the eye of a snail painted by artist Denise Scicluna.

USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project.

Aram Bartholl, from deaddrops.com writes that "a very beautiful Dead Drop shows only the metal sheath enclosed type - A USB plug and is cemented into walls. You would hardly notice it... A Dead Drop is a naked piece of passively powered Universal Serial Bus technology embedded into the city, the only true public space. In an era of growing clouds and fancy new devices without access to local files we need to rethink the freedom and distribution of data."

HOW TO INSTALL A DEAD DROP

Dead Drops 'How to' - NYC from aram bartholl on Vimeo.

On January 23, 2006, the Russian FSB accused Britain of using wireless dead drops concealed inside hollowed-out rocks to collect espionage information from agents in Russia. According to the Russian authorities, the agent delivering information would approach the rock and transmit data wirelessly into it from a hand-held device, and later his British handlers would pick up the stored data by similar means.