[justin66]

> A mechanical sliding piece of material without any electrical components at all must be considered simpler (and thus "less engineered") than an LED, mustn't it?

Absolutely not. The moving parts vs. no moving parts divide is pretty huge, and an LED is not a complicated thing.

> I would be way easier to convince that a piece of plastic is harder to hack than a LED. For instance, there would be no embedded microcontroller to subvert.

Having the LED in parallel on the power line is impossible to subvert without a soldering iron. I don't know why people are having trouble understanding this bit.

Perhaps to do this properly with a USB camera you'd need to give the camera its own USB controller. My god, who cares? The USB thing was just an example. The point is that you can wire in an LED such that when the camera has power, the LED has power.

> that doesn't mean the camera is performing any recording

The light today doesn't signify "recording," it just signifies that the camera is on.