For the price of only 100 bucks, two professors – Kevin McDonald and Brian House – have created a light bulb that covertly listens to nearby conversations and publicly tweets them as snippets of text. Conversnitch, as the device is called, is built from a Raspberry Pi dev board, an LED-light source, a microphone, and a plastic flower.
“This is stuff you can buy and have running in a few hours,” says McDonald, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts. The device screws into an ordinary light socket and uses public Wi-Fi to upload the captured audio onto Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, where for a small fee; workers convert it to text and post it on a special twitter account. It’s so easy that anyone can this.
Here’s a brief taste of some of the conversations picked up by Conversnitch:
And ironically:
Last one, I promise:
Yes, I have to agree – there is irony here.
Contrary to how despicable this may seem, McDonald and House are using these shock tactics to incite public awareness of how little privacy is actually available amidst the era of Internet-connected-everything. “What does it mean to deploy one of these in a library, a public square, someone’s bedroom? What kind of power relationship does it set up?” asks House, a 34-year-old adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. “And what does this stream of tweets mean if it’s not set up by an artist but by the U.S. government?”
Conversnitch’s first field test was conducted on October, 2013, at the “Prism Break Up” Eyebeam exhibition in New York City, but the professor-pair would not reveal any other locations. It’s legal to record a conversation in the State of New York if at least one member of the party involved is aware ─ meaning you’re legally allowed to record your own conversations with other people ─ but recording strangers chatting is illegal.
The conversation fragments pictured above may have been extracted from one of five bugged locations in New York City depicted in the video below: A lighting fixture in a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant, a desk lamp in a bank lobby, a desk lamp inside a bedroom, a lamp post in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, and even a lighting fixture in a public library.
Names are automatically taken out by the hired Amazon’s Mechanical Turk work force for privacy’s sake; McDonald and House don’t actually wish to exploit your information, they just want to make you aware of how easy it is to do so.
If the project causes wide swept anger and controversy, all the better, says McDonald, who is no stranger to controversy. In 2011 his computers were seized by the Secret Service after Apple discovered he installed software that captures and uploads pictures of customers’ faces from Apple Store computers, also in an attempt to incite outrage.
McDonald argues that Conversnitch pales in comparison to seemingly omnipotent efforts enacted by the NSA. “Here were Brian and I trying to make something kind of scary, something that makes you wonder if someone’s watching you all the time. And then Snowden says, ‘They are.’” He tells Wired.
Via Wired
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