Notes for season 1 episode 5 “Judgement”
02:00 Finch is reading “It Can’t Happen Here” in 2011, several years before everyone started calling it prescient.
05:25 another iPhone interface on a not-very-iPhone bad guy phone – are they not allowed to use iPhones?
01:37 Finch “When you work for the government, access is not a problem.”
14:04 more bad phone opsec where someone keeps their unregistered crime-phone switched on when they go home.
31:35 “Hey, that’s account data” says a bank employee despite not being able to actually see what’s on the screen.
32:00 The thing where Fusco is able to access the private bodega cctv (with an OCR-A timecode) from his desktop since it’s on “the NYPD surveillance feed” doesn’t seem far-fetched.
33:10 So the plot involves software installed by banks to block money laundering transactions, where someone has the ability to remotely disable detection for a three-minute window. It sort of implies the detection happens in real-time. I don’t know how it happens in the real world, but I’d assume that finding evidence of money laundering is something that’s done retrospectively through data-analysis – where that evidence is passed to the authorities rather than acted on directly. For example a report from 2017 describes how “proactive transaction-data interrogation” can be used to identify possible sex workers (who might be trafficked) by looking at particular patterns of payments.
39:38 Brutalised and restrained suspects, and evidence provided by an anonymous vigilante who won’t be available to testify. Works for Spider-Man, we assume.