Notes for season 1 episode 8, “Foe”
01:22 Jim Robinson! Alan Dale has been a prolific guest-star in movies and tv for years, but for many people he’ll always be their Aussie soap opera dad.
05:00 The 1970s cold case in previous episodes, and now cold war spying, give the show a legitimate reason to have characters handle “dossiers” – those folders of typewritten paper documents, paper-clipped photographs. A visual language familiar to movies, but in the 21st century, where the US blamed a lack of information sharing for lapses prior to September 11th, these intelligence files would (you assume) normally be printed copies of an electronic original.
12:30 Finch gets information from the BND agent’s encrypted phone. “Every text is blocked except the [last] one they were reading”, which seems like a bit of an opsec fail for the BND?
18:00 Looks like Reese got his iPhone 4 repaired. Or at least pulled a new one from the pile of burner phones Finch undoubtably has.
19:13 The subtitles read “[angrily speaking German]”
20:32 “The website wasn’t even using an OpenSSH secure proxy. I cloned their login form in seconds.” This is plausible sounding nonsense, but does stem from a tech issue at the time. There was a period where wifi access was popular, but most websites hadn’t fully adopted https (or they implemented it on a login page, but then issued session-cookies that were sent over http connections). In late 2010 a Firefox plugin called Firesheep was released that allowed users to hijack the web accounts of anyone on the same wifi network.
(It’s the basis of the, now questionable, claims about “hackers at coffee shops” that you still hear in VPN adverts.)
This triggered the move to using https for all website accesses. Facebook, for example, announced the optional enablement of https in January 2011. But the process of getting high-profile sites to switch would be years long. (Similarly, the replacement of telnet with ssh was also something that would still have been ongoing in 2011.)
28:03 “The Stasi would have killed for this technology.” A former Stasi agent making… the same observation that every critic of modern surveillance has made at some point.
43:00 “He goes in the ground under a name that isn’t even his” – spoilers for the final episode!