If The Social Network taught us anything, it's that no technology feels real until it's effectively rendered in moving pictures. That's why this new video of the software tracking every keystroke on most Nokia, Android and BlackBerry devices is so important.

Security researcher Trevor Eckhart has recently been shining light on something called Carrier IQ, a sort of "rootkit" that is embedded in a staggering array of phones, monitoring events like button presses, screen taps, text message traffic, GPS location lookups, and web traffic. Now Eckhart has taken the crucial step of putting the creepy spy software to video. His 17-minute upload captures a disturbing flow of data from his stock HTC Evo Android phone, even when he's entire logged off the cell network. Watching text messages and Google searches surreptitiously retransmitted puts to lie Carrier IQ Inc.'s claim that its software is only meant "to understand... where phone calls are dropped, where signal quality is poor, why applications crash and battery life."

Some of the more interesting bits start at 13:50 in the video, above, as well as at 11:30 and 9:05. Maybe now that this widespread phone tapping is no longer confined to invisible network traffic, customers will stop tolerating it.