Anti-Surveillance Device

The logic for this project is long-winded, so prepare for walls of text.

Original Sketches/Data Vis

Process/

The basis of this sketch is in a Vigenere Cipher, a complex reassortment of letters similar to how the Enigma machine operated, turned to color. The cipher discloses where protestors are to gather in NYC to best evade hostile law enforcement and minimize police brutality instances. The cipher is multi-layered to throw off an outside entities that might want to use the information within for harm. The cipher is also password protected, requiring the user to input "heyThere" and hit their enter key before proceeding.

The logic for the cipher is as follows: each pedal of the center flower represents a borough of NYC; within each pedal are subpedals that disclose the ideal gathering location for protestors within each borough. The main flower has 4 iterations, all of which scramble the color each borough is assigned and the location of each color on the pedal (the location of the pedals shifts mostly to throw code-crackers off). There are 5 primary colors each borough can take, red, blue, green, yellow, and purple, respectively assigned to r, b, g, y, and p. A series of if() loops handles the scrambling for each iteration, with the iteration itself handled by a random() function. More if() loops provide a colored backdrop that details which iteration is currently being displayed: 1 is cyan, 2 is pink, 3 is magenta, and 4 is orange. Within the colored background is a smaller colored circle responsible to detailing which subiteration (the scrambling of the locations within the boroughs) is being displayed, and a small circle nearly covered by the flower itself details which bridge, between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, is the safest to occupy. The map above was for a larger-scale plan that involved more than two possible protrsting locations; since I couldn't figure out how best to implement more locations within the subiterations, the colors of the inner flower are static.

Below are some code snippits of the iterations at work:

Reflection

The NYC protests, going strong since late May, have been a massively important part of my life since they first started. As someone who lives near Barclays Center, where the initial protests gathered and where a great deal of police brutality and crowd control took place, the protests became an integral part of my daily life and my cultural identity as a New Yorker. Knowing the police often attempt ot predict the location of protests to best distribute their riot gear and stand in place for illegal kettling, I created a draft of my anti-surveillance device to keep protestors on the ground safe and instances of violence to a minimum. The tool provides a thoroughly encrypted means to which protest organizers can communicate with attendees over channels not yet cracked by the police, giving protestors a leg-up in the information war being waged behind the scenes of the Black Lives Matter protests as a whole.

Initially, I had no meaningful visual design and instead was going to only use a series of numbers, both auible and visible, to do the job my flower now does. The original inspiration was the dated practice of Numbers Stations, relic of Cold War-era espionage that broadcast nothing but numbers, intended to carry messages to infiltrating spies through covert means. The flower came to be when I realized numbers alone proved too easy a cipher to break, and that a visual element was needed to at least keep the sketch interesting. The flower stands both as a universal symbol of verdant life and peace, pacifistic in nature and offered as a sign of kinship and affection. So too does the flower have thorns capable of defending itself, able to fend for its own should it need and unafraid of the world around it no matter how hostile.