English | EN The DIY Spy (Amazon + Twitter + IoT)
May 21, 2014
How to build your own surveillance gadget? That’s easy with a Raspberry Pi, Amazon Mechanical Turk and a Twitter account. Using the power from an ordinary light bulb socket you can listen into conversations 24/7. The recordings are sent to a crowdsource platform called Mechanical Turk, where small fees are paid to translate audio into text. Small snippets from these conversations are then send to Conversnitch’s twitter account (@conversnitch) and then read what people are saying. For instance: “I had a student puke on me earlier this week”. This video shows how it works and on github you will find alll the source code to DIY yourself into a spy.
Conversnitch from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.
Conversnitch is a project form Brian House, an artist, who worked at the New York Times Research and development Lab and now teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Kyle McDonnald, another artist who works as an adjunt professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.
In an interview with Wired, McDonald says Conversnitch is just a taste of the real privacy threats facing Americans in an age of the sweeping NSA surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden: “You can’t make this stuff up anymore. 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.’”
About the author
