Going into full paranoid mode, I wonder if some other sensors / components can be used as a makeshift microphone. For instance, a sufficiently accurate accelerometer can pick up vibrations, right? Maybe even the laser in a CD drive? Anything else?
"We also explore how to leverage the rolling shutter in regular consumer cameras to recover audio from standard frame-rate videos, and use the spatial resolution of our method to visualize how sound-related vibrations vary over an object’s surface, which we can use to recover the vibration modes of an object."
A condenser microphone is just a capacitor. Your computer is full of them.
They are very low level input and generally need a pre-amp just to get the signal outside the microphone. However conceptually at least they are there and so maybe someone can get it to work.
