The Dark Knight - High Frequency Generator Scene
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as a pop-culture analogy for mass surveillance technology that now looks plausible.
What it is
Clip from The Dark Knight in which Batman uses a sonar-based system that turns phones into a city-wide surveillance network.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites netsharc · 2020-11 · on “Beirut Port Explosion”
Like Deja Vu ( [LINK] ), The Dark Knight's sonar ( [this video] ) or the series Devs. I've always thought it'd be amazing to be able to view an event from different angles via crowd-sourced videos, and that it was very doable. From an information scientist point of view, I'm glad to see it's been done.
Cites hangsi · 2024-04 · on “Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight”
"Beautiful. Unethical. Dangerous." So says Morgan Freeman's character Lucius Fox in 2008 in The Dark Knight[0]. The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too, considering the density of WiFi/5G and research demonstrating the potential for its use as passive radar [1]. That paper metions a cooperative base station, but I am wondering if there is any value gained in knowing exactly what the traffic is (such as some of the intelligence community does) in modelling how the waves propagate and performing an even more passive observation. [0] [this video] [1] Samczyński et al. 2021 [LINK]