As reported in Wired magazine, artists Brian House and Kyle McDonald have been installing wifi listening devices in lamps in public areas around New York City. The intercepted conversations are uploaded to a server and parts of the transcription gets tweeted live.
The components of Conversnitch, including a Raspberry Pi miniature computer, an LED light source and a plastic flower pot. Photo: Kyle McDonald
From Wired:
As former NSA director Michael Hayden learned on an Amtrak train last year, anyone with a smartphone instantly can become a live tweeting snoop. Now a whole crowd of amateur eavesdroppers could be as close as the nearest light fixture.
Two artists have revealed Conversnitch, a device they built for less than $100 that resembles a light bulb or lamp and surreptitiously listens in on nearby conversations and posts snippets of transcribed audio to Twitter. Kyle McDonald and Brian House say they hope to raise questions about the nature of public and private spaces in an era when anything can be broadcast by ubiquitous, Internet-connected listening devices.
The surveillance gadget they unveiled Wednesday is constructed from little more than a Raspberry Pi miniature computer, a microphone, an LED and a plastic flower pot. It screws into and draws power from any standard bulb socket. Then it uploads captured audio via the nearest open Wi-Fi network to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, which McDonald and House pay small fees to transcribe the audio and post lines of conversation to Conversnitch’s Twitter account. “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.
But a video they’ve posted online (embedded below) shows two people with obscured faces planting Conversnitch in a light fixture in a New York McDonald’s, disguised as a desk lamp in a bedroom and a bank lobby, in a library, and inside a lamp post in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. A glance at the Conversnitch Twitter feed shows fragments of conversations about topics as private as a failed course,a job interview rejection, someone’s frayed relationship with his or her boss and criticisms of a politician.
Conversnitch from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.
The two artists did caution Mechanical Turk workers to obscure any names mentioned in eavesdropped conversations by reducing them to a single initial. And they admit that the transcriptions they’ve received are also less than 100 percent trustworthy; they’ve deleted several tweets amid suspicions that turkers were fabricating quotes.
But if Conversnitch does manage to cause outrage or controversy, all the better, says McDonald. After all, his work first hit the spotlight in 2011 when he installed a program on Apple Store computers that automatically captured images of customers’ faces and uploaded them to his server. Apple responded by calling the Secret Service, which executed a search warrant on McDonald’s apartment and confiscated two computers.
How many of your employees might think that is a cool idea and want to try it at the office?