Notes for season 1 episode 11, “Super”
01:26 Finch finds a morgue attendant who was a talented surgeon in Iraq, but unable to perform that role in the US due to the cost of a medical license. Tapping into the cultural idea that America has skilled immigrants doing comparatively menial work, because they can’t overcome particular systemic barriers. Looks like the USMLE costs around $3000 (not including course materials) which would be a small fraction of the money Finch dumps on the table.
04:10 Fusco has a stronger password than I was generally using in 2011, “Cq1=qmhr*q1“, but writing it on a post-it you keep in your desk is a Deus Ex-level opsec fail. I can’t really criticise this too much – the episode takes place December 2011 to January 2012, and this is the same period over which I started transferring my passwords from a small notebook into a password manager (1Password) and switching to stronger auto-generated pass-phrases.
04:24 Gratuitous OCR-A use the cctv footage. I appreciate how OCR-A has resonance with the themes of the show, it is in essence an accommodation for the vision of machines. But in reality it’s very specific. The only time you’ll see it used is with paper-based processes that haven’t been updated since the 1970s. You might still see it on pre-printed cheques, assuming cheques are something you ever have need to see. There’s probably a generational cut-off in recognising it from actual use, as opposed to a media-shorthand for “computery”.
04:48 Again, apparently you can get location data from cell companies by just calling and claiming to be a police officer.
07:00 The moment you see Reese in a wheelchair, you already know this episode is going to be “Rear Window but with webcams”
11:00 Finch waves a copy of Tocqueville’s book on the success of democracy in an industrialised country. And whenever you have a book shown briefly on-screen in a J J Abrams-produced show you’re invited to consider whether the choice of title hints at the broader plot arc of the show, or if it means… nothing.
12:16 One of the building’s hacked webcam feeds looks very “Yoga on Twitch“
14:12 Wait, Reese invited the Super into the apartment where he had the building’s hacked cameras still displaying on a big TV?
19:00 “If no human sees what The Machine sees, then technically no-one’s Fourth Amendment rights have been violated.” The argument along the lines of “it’s not legally a search if it’s a machine doing the searching” is something that has been said by officials defending intrusive internet searching in the years following the Snowden revelations. It always made me think of the “it’s legal to carry drugs if you’re not physically touching them“ bit from Brass Eye.
21:00 Reese files down a key, presumably a spare, into a “bump key“
21:07 The production team have opted to use fake “.web” addresses, rather than impose a perpetual registration burden on Warners. It was a common practice in the show, and indeed a common practise in TV and movies. Except, in 2016, .web was approved as a new top level domain. Legal matters have prevented its operation so far, but at some point all those previously-fake domains will be available.
21:33 “She changes her wifi password every day.” Finch lauds this as a good security habit, but it seems like it would be a massive pain. Unless you’ve just got devices that can be reset using a WPS button. But in 2011, a few weeks before this episode aired, the WPS PIN feature was found to be brute-forcable in hours.
22:47 Finch’s bump-key technique is to slam the glass display of his cell-phone against the back of the key? I guess he can afford a replacement phone, but still.
27:00 Carter took a SIM card earlier, presumably to use her phone without being tracked by IMSI use, but, since she’s using her own phone, she could still potentially be tracked by IMEI.
41:24 The key piece of information in the flashback was gas station receipt from 2002, printed in… OCR-A.