The door to Jeff Tibbetts’ DIY operating room in his garage in Tehachapi, California, is covered with the signatures of those who have gone under his knife in the white-walled room on the other side. Tibbetts, a professional nurse and a self-taught body modification artist, is in high demand among grinders, a community of biohackers with a penchant for implanting nonmedical devices in their bodies. Many of the names on his door are accompanied by a short description of the procedure they received: James implanted an “APT KEY”; Justin walked out with “3 test magnets”; and Rich got something called a “blood diamond.” Tibbetts’ alias, Cassox, is also on the door. Of the dozens of devices implanted in his body over the years, most were inserted with his own scalpel.

The most recent signature on Tibbetts’ door belongs to Michael Laufer, the public face of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, a controversial group of anarcho-biohackers that wants to open-source the production of lifesaving pharmaceuticals. But it was a different project that brought Laufer to Tibbetts’ garage in August: an implantable device called PegLeg.

PegLeg is a wireless router and hard drive rolled into one small, subdermal device. Laufer and a small group of collaborators created it using less than $50 of hardware. It’s a little larger than a pack of gum, but once implanted it turns your body into a node of a local mesh network. Any Wi-Fi-enabled device can access the device’s network, and the implant can also mesh with other PegLegs to create what is, effectively, an internet of legs.

PegLeg doesn’t connect to the internet backbone that you’re using to read this article. Instead, it creates a local wireless network that anyone in the same room can access. The implant can store hundreds of gigabytes of data, stream movies or music to connected phones or computers, act as a server for an anonymized chat room or forum, and smuggle encrypted files across international borders. PegLeg was designed so that anyone who connects to the device’s network can upload or download files to the hard drive anonymously, but this radical openness raises thorny legal questions about who is responsible for the data stored in another person’s body.

Welcome to the age of thigh speed internet.

PegLeg is an offshoot of a similar open-source device called the PirateBox. David Darts, an art professor at New York University, created it in 2011 as a way to easily share files with his students and to challenge the distinction between “sharing” and “piracy.” The original PirateBox consisted of a wireless router, a network adapter, and a thumb drive all packed into a lunchbox emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. Over the years, emergency responders, teachers, librarians, and artists have all used it for their own ends.

Someone asked the question that you’ll only hear at a grinder meetup: Can I put that in my body?

In 2018, Laufer brought his PirateBox to Grindfest, an annual biohacking meetup hosted at Tibbetts’ house, as a way for attendees to share files. When he brought out the device at this year’s Grindfest in May, someone asked the question that you’ll only hear at a grinder meetup: Can I put that in my body? Over the course of the weekend, Laufer worked with two collaborators, Zac Shannon and Nick Titus, to find out.

The PegLeg is based on the PirateBox, created by David Darts in 2011 to locally share files without connecting to the internet. David Darts Turning the PirateBox into an implant required a drastic reduction in its size. David Darts

They managed to reduce the PirateBox to about the size of a box of cards, but with a thinner profile. It included just a portable commercial router, stripped down to its circuit board and flashed with the PirateBox software. But it was still giant as far as implants go.

The biggest challenge, says Titus, was figuring out how to power the thing. Biohackers tend to shy away from implanting batteries, which can swell and crack the biosafe resin that coats an implant. Instead, they opted for a wireless power receiver, which uses the same Qi protocol that can wirelessly charge smartphones. Since there is no battery, PegLeg can’t store power and only works when a wireless charger is held near the implant. But if the device is inside your thigh, you can just tuck the wireless charger in your pocket to allow for hands-free operation.