Well, you could always test it by trying to record something with tape over the mic. If you hear muffled/distorted noise, you know the tape works.

I'm not being antagonistic. You said that the security risks of mics and cameras were "well-documented". I'd never heard anything and would be interested to know about them, if they exist.
I do come to this forum to help people; but also to be helped and learn more. It's an exchange of information.

From my understanding (which may be wrong), there is nothing inherently insecure about having a mic and camera on your own laptop. And that seems to be what others are saying, too.
The reason for my questioning you about the security risks, was to make you consider whether disabling the mic is something that is really necessary.

As others have said, it is possible for someone with physical access to the machine to engineer something; or perhaps for some trojan to turn on the mic and relay it. But as I said in my first post, this is only one of a number of things that they could do. By that point, they would have control of your ENTIRE machine.

A keylogger that detected your passwords is much more fruitful and likely, from a criminal point of view, than listening to what you might be saying to someone else whilst you're in front of your laptop.

Well then, apologies for misconstruing your intentions. It just seems a bit hostile to attempt to guide someone to a conclusion with demands for information they never claimed to know when you could instead have simply explained it.

The desire to finally do something about my suspicion of built in recording devices came a bit out of the blue, and although I'm certain I've read many articles detailing instances in which they were used for insidious purposes, that was awhile ago, and I don't exactly have a means by which to direct people to them at this point. Though I'm sure most of these cases occurred in poorly maintained windows machines, the knowledge that such a thing can and does occur is still unsettling. Happened to one of my cousins years back, in fact, with a rather psychotic ex. You always hear people going on about how crazy their exes were, but this guy actually deserved the title for once. I was young at the time and didn't find it particularly interesting, so I'm not entirely clear on details like why they didn't press charges, or how they knew it was him. Perhaps they simply couldn't prove it, and that was their reasoning. Either way, I believe he had originally intended to procure blackmail (or maybe masturbation) material, but I guess when a few days passed without anything incriminating happening in front of the cam, he got frustrated and resigned to just freaking her out by making his control of the computer known. Looking back on it now, it sounds like it was controlled remotely, probably with Back Orifice or something of that nature, but it isn't as though I can be entirely sure.

While I know now that I'm very unlikely to be at risk of such a thing by simple virtue of practicing basic security and computer literacy, it's still a troubling thought I figured may as well not remain unaddressed.

EDIT: Oh, looks like adding Back Orifice to the search query turns up some fairly recent results.
http://www.slate.com/id/2215499/pagenum/all/
http://i48.tinypic.com/1zr051w.jpg

You came to the forum claiming that security problems with webcams and mics were well-known and well-documented.
It's not hostile to reply "Really? I find that surprising and haven't heard anything about that. Please tell me more." But apologies nonetheless.
Instead, I could have asserted "You have nothing to worry about. Don't bother." But you might have some evidence that this was wrong, so questioning seemed prudent.

Back Orifice is Windows malware. It's certainly easier to take control of a Windows box, and the vast majority of malware is targeted at Windows OS.

Sorry to hear about your cousin. If a relationship goes sour, and one of the parties had access to your computer, or had keys to your house, or other access, then bad things may occur.

True, objectively, but I'm not exactly a frequent poster here, and in all of the other places I frequent, something worded as those posts were would definitely be intended as a snipe. Funny 'ol internet, eh?

If someone obtains physical access to your Mac laptop they can remotely exploit it, and yes you can control the camera from the command line. A guy got busted doing this to college women (he was some sort of IT, like geek squad or something) and their laptops and he got busted because a girl noticed the green light kept coming on so she started to google what that meant.

Another example is someone in NYC got their Mac stolen and they used back to my Mac or log me in or some sort of web based remote desktop and logged into their mac remotely and took a snap shot of the thief with the camera and got their laptop back.

There is an app called iAlertU which is like a "car alarm" type app for your Mac laptop, which also uses the camera and will email you snapped pics when the alarm is triggered.

Now, is it heavily documented? No, but it is out there, and yes you can probably use those in some very strange and esoteric conditions to exploit someone's security.

Whenever I get any macbook back from repair the first thing I do is image it. Not that I don't trust my third party guys that do all the warranty repair, I just don't know who is all involved and since it is third party I just image it as standard procedure.

Looks like I'm the only one to have considered what little info is out there adequate documentation. Oh well.

I hate to necro the thread, but I was just sent this link, and I was wondering if someone could provide an explanation...

http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...readid=3238852

EDIT: Oh, looks like it might be a bit NSFW, if you're at work or something.

The page is about searching Google for open webcams that are already on and broadcasting to the web. They are "insecure" in the sense that they are freely available, even if the owner/user might not intend the world to eavesdrop.

You can't use Google to turn on someone's web camera.

Ah, alright. I hadn't been under the impression that an inactive webcam could be activated in this way, but was wondering if personal cams being used for some other purpose, like, say, videochatting, could be viewed in such a manner.

Seems odd that so many businesses would have such bad security, though.

I don't know much about videochat, but I would presume that it's more point-to-point, and doesn't just serve its content to anyone who requests it.

I was taught years ago that "a phone call is not a private conversation". This was in the UK in the 70s. Whether legally accurate or not, it's still sage advice and can be applied to anything you do online. Once it has left your computer; the world has it.

I was told this only applied to wireless phones, but by now I'm sure nothing is free of governmental spying, at least in the US and UK. Technically things transmitted over any medium could be made private/unintelligible if encrypted properly, though, correct? Even an IM client I used to use had some such feature. Not that I'm exactly well versed when it comes to cryptography, but...