In the pre-Snowden era, believing that a household object was listening to you was enough to have you committed to correctional facilities for state-sponsored reprogramming.



In his new book, No Place to Hide, the journalist Glenn Greenwald explains how he and the NSA contractor turned whistleblower put their phones in a freezer with the batteries disconnected to thwart spooks’ ability to operate phones remotely as microphones. But what would happen if the fridge itself was listening to your words?

Two American artists are now taking that concept to a logical conclusion. Using only a credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer, a microphone and a Wi-Fi card hacked into a lightbulb fitting, and a piece of open source software hosted at Github, they have installed a listening device at an undisclosed spot in Manhattan, New York, and connected it to a Twitter feed.



“There are many ways this could be implemented, some totally for free,” says Brian House, a 34-year-old artist living in New York, who co-created the project with Kyle MacDonald. “Our version costs between $50 and 100 as it includes a Raspberry Pi and a microphone."

House explains how it works. "The device continually records 10-second snippets of audio, analyses them for potential voice content, and sends promising file to Mechanical Turk for transcription. The system then posts these transcriptions to Twitter."

The Twitter feed’s transcriptions themselves are at times cryptic, and at others strangely touching; but always deeply voyeuristic.



"So you are posting stuff you don't want me to see. What are you posting about?" — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 18, 2014

"Do you take any medication to help with your symptoms?" — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 16, 2014

"I won't lie [?] babies are not cute, this one pretty much looks like a baby monkey with all of that hair." — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 25, 2014

"I think that white people just act the way we want them to act around us" — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) May 6, 2014

"I cried myself to sleep last night and I woke up with my eyes all puffy and I was like this is not gonna work" — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 26, 2014

"Are you sure you want to be talking about this? I really don't know if this is the place." — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 18, 2014

"I can't help it. I know she's old and has dementia, but she drives me nuts." — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 16, 2014

"It's like they know." — Conversnitch (@conversnitch) April 15, 2014

How would the speakers of each of these phrases feel to see their words documented like this? How would you feel to have your private conversations overheard and live-tweeted? Why not feel the same way about Prism, XKeyscore, or Tempora?



Stripped of context, these comments might make you consider anew the ramifications of a world in which there is no privacy, nor any expectation of it. It reifies the notion that someone, somehow, somewhere in an office in Virginia, Utah or Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is listening to your every word. That’s not paranoia; that’s the modern surveillance state, say the artists, who considered a live audio stream but settled on text instead.



The artists say: “The ability to dissect and understand text is also the foundation for the international surveillance machine. Once you have something that is searchable, knowable, you can make decisions and predictions from it – and that's where the danger is. That idea of making the real world searchable in realtime is the foundation for Conversnitch.”



Its aims, they say, are to play with ideas around technology and politics. “Binaries like public/private, physical/digital, human/automated are being totally reconfigured at the moment, and that is very much a political issue.



“The secret deployment of Prism and other programs is a clear violation of democratic principles, and it demands a rethinking of how a free society needs to work in an age when data-producing technology is so integrated into everyday life.”



The artists say they would "certainly" collaborate with authorities if they heard someone confessing to a serious crime or plotting a terrorist incident, but what do they think of the ethics of releasing code and information that might help people spy on their friends, co-workers, or spouses? “Since time immemorial there have been all kinds of creative ways to do this," says House. "Releasing the code is a prompt to other artists to iterate on the idea, and it demonstrates how easy something like this is to set up, hopefully producing some critical reflection."

• This article was amended on 23 May 2014 to correct an error in the title of Greenwald's book.

