The FBI Director Puts Tape Over His Webcam
I care about audio so much more than video, and text/keys/etc captured from the machine even more.  As long as my screen and keyboard  are out of the frame of the camera, I don't <i>really</i> care about it getting RATed.  At worst, you'll see me naked, or making angry/etc. faces at someone on irc or email.  While embarrassing it would be less bad than most of what you could accomplish by stealing actual information.<p>OTOH, carrying around a microphone connected to the Internet which can be remotely enabled at any time without leaving any real trace (battery use/network use is the only real sign, although even that could be covered up to a great degree -- there is probably a way to do either low-fidelity or infrequent audio pickup, maybe keyed on location and charger state, and on-device pre-processing) -- people do this all the time  Mostly because there's no real alternative to carrying smartphone yet.<p>Plus, of course, there's the fact that no modern desktop OS is particularly secure -- either you give up auto-updates and likely fall to bugs, or use auto-updates and are at risk to your OS vendor or anyone who can compel him.  So sensors attached to it, as well as stuff processed on it, is also at risk.  You can somewhat mitigate this through a large combination of other protections, but it's almost impossible for a single user single machine to solve that problem.<p>I'd love a custom run of Dell Chromebook 13 or Lenovo Thinkpad 13 Chrome Edition with no built-in mic/camera, and an EPROM vs. EEPROM, and some special case features.  Would be willing to commit to buy 10k units at ~$800/unit retail in 8-16GB x 32GB config.