When you look at the success of shows like MTV’s The Real World, The Real Housewives of… well, anywhere, and the multitude of programming that exists solely to portray the “real lives” of “real people” going about their daily business, it’s really no surprise that a similar model now exists on Twitter. Conversnitch, the brainchild of Kyle McDonald and Brian House, is a listening device disguised as a lamp that is already picking up snippets of people’s conversations around New York. Due to legal issues, the duo won’t say where exactly the devices have been planted; which means that at any point in time, anywhere you go, someone somewhere could be listening. And that’s kind of the point they’re trying to make – that we now live in an age where regardless of who is listening or watching, you can be sure that someone nearly always is.

The creators began developing the idea for Conversnitch around the same time that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the sweeping surveillance being conducted by the NSA, originally just as an experimental tool to show some of the real privacy threats facing Americans. Now, McDonald says “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.”

Conversnitch is a fairly simple concept that cost less than $100 to make. It’s comprised of a Raspberry Pi mini computer, a microphone, an LED and a plastic flower pot, and draws power from a standard bulb socket. The device uploads captured audio via the nearest open Wi-Fi network then sends the data to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, where the audio is transcribed and posted to Conversnitch’s Twitter account. Aside from a few issues on the Turk side of things (some Tweets were removed due to suspicions that the quotes were falsified), this super snooping gadget has worked exactly as intended – and that has some people really freaked out.

This is not Kyle McDonald’s first foray into experimental snooping. Some of you may recall his 2011 fiasco, in which he installed a program on the computers in Apple stores that automatically captured images of customers’ faces and uploaded them to his server. That particular adventure resulted in a call to the Secret Service, who ended up obtaining a search warrant for his apartment and subsequently confiscating two of his computers. Not one to be discouraged by a little legal trouble, McDonald forged ahead soon after with Conversnitch. As he says, if it does manage to cause outrage or controversy, all the better. At the very least, people always seem to be at their most honest when they think no one is listening, so the entertainment factor alone makes the feed worth checking out.