[squarefoot]

> within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else.

Except for botnets and/or spying. Some of those boards already contain MEMS microphones and cameras (the box in the picture even shows the camera objective). I'd have took apart the device to take a look inside, or at least run some diagnostics to explore which hardware was installed/detected.

[netsharc]

I wonder if cat /dev/video1 would be enough to turn it into a surveillance device..

[squarefoot]

Not sure about cat, but if one could sneak in netcat or better ffmpeg on Android, then opening a audio/video channel to the outside could become trivial.