zlacker

Shorting the two wires of the mic together with a low-value resistor will do what you want, or you can have a physical disconnect switch. It's very easy to modify a mic in this manner if desired. You can even have the switch built into the sliding webcam cover. On digital mics it's a bit more complex to mute without disabling, but the brute force solution is to disconnect their power line in the same manner. Then again, you now have to watch out for things like accelerometers in the board or hard disk which can reconstruct keypresses or act as a very low quality microphone.

>>Klimen+(OP)
That last point is interesting. Even with an RF detector, an accelerometer may act as a cheap room bug. Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars? Now I'm scaring myself.

>>Klimen+(OP)
> things like accelerometers

Personally, I am not worried about quite sophisticated attackers. When securing my house I'm worried about run-of-the-mill burglars, and this is like that.

>>mclovi+22
Heck, if automobiles use them to detect when an airbag should be deployed, why not just use them as bugs in cars?

AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen.

Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI

And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...

>>userbi+bn
Very good points.