USB dead drop

A USB dead drop is a USB mass storage device installed in a public space. For example, a USB flash drive might be mounted in an outdoor brick wall and fixed in place with fast concrete. Members of the public are implicitly invited to find files, or leave files, on a dead drop by directly plugging their laptop into the wall-mounted USB stick in order to transfer data. (It is also possible to use smartphones and tablets for this purpose, by utilizing a USB on-the-go cable.) The dead drops can therefore be regarded as an anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer file sharing network. However, in practice USB dead drops are often used for social or artistic reasons, rather than for practical ones.

The 'Dead Drops' project was conceived by Berlin-based conceptual artist Aram Bartholl, a member of New York's Fat lab art and technology collective. The first USB dead drop network of five devices was started by Bartholl in October 2010 in Brooklyn, New York City. The name comes from the dead drop method of espionage communication. An unrelated system called "deadSwap," in which participants use an SMS gateway to coordinate passing USB memory sticks on to one another, was begun in Germany in 2009.

Each dead drop is typically installed without any data on the drive, except two files: deaddrops-manifesto.txt, and a readme.txt file explaining the project. Although typically found in urban areas embedded in concrete or brick since 2010, installation of USB dead drop into trees and other types of bodies in natural settings has also been mentioned since at least 2013.Wireless dead drops such as the 2011 PirateBox, where the user connects to a wifi hotspot with local storage rather than physically connects to a USB device, have also been created.

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