Notes for season 3 episode 2, “Nothing to Hide“
04:00 Lifetrace appears to be a people-centric search engine. (Add thelifetrace.com to the Warners domain pool.) Finch treats data brokers with distain, which seems a little off. Comparisons to the operation of the Machine aside, every week Finch builds up full dossiers of not only the irrelevants, but also their enemies, co-workers, friends, and family. Is he not using services like Lifetrace for this? Is he ignoring extant services and doing it manually on principle? If so, what principle?
05:00 In a little world-building move, Lifetrace pages linking to Friendzcar. I don’t think we ever get introduced to the companies behind the fish icon (not Angler, it seems) or “i+”.
05:35 Remember when they used wired headphones back in the 2010s?
07:12 Kruger congratulating the executive for an unannounced pregnancy, is almost certainly an allusion to the “Father complains about Target’s direct advertising that implied his daughter was pregnant” story that ran on Forbes in 2012 (itself based on an NYT story). While it has become a shorthand for the the power of “big data”, I’ve become suspicious of the details in the source anecdote, as it ultimately seems to inflate the powers of these services. I think we’re rightly more sceptical when the claims are about identifying criminals and terrorists from their data exhaust, rather than the effective advertising of baby formula.
11:19 I love that they take every opportunity to show Shaw eating indelicately.
11:55 Finch apparently has the ability to search for deleted things, like “My Abusive Ex Found Me on Lifetrace”, on the web. Maybe it’s something like the Lumen database, or that site that lets you see things removed by Reddit moderators.
16:30 Karen Mills doesn’t explain how intimate pictures of her ended up on Lifetrace. Was it revenge porn? A hack of cloud storage? Much as I have concerns, it doesn’t feel like a search engine should be assigned moral responsibility for the content it surfaces. (It might have been different story if pornographic images had been wrongly attributed by the site using, for example, facial recognition.)
21:30 Kruger receives a call from a 1970s Cylon?
22:25 That’s some unfortunate editing – Kruger leaves the elevator, runs down stairs, and is back in the elevator?
23:53 The packages are described as anonymous, but they do have unique barcoded stamps. The stamps look like those generated by USPS self-service stations, and will contain data including a unique ID of the machine that printed them and the date… which would presumably be a valid line of enquiry? (In theory, since it’s readable on the stamp, it would be possible to collate a list of machine identifiers and locations without needing access to the USPS database.)
The stamps are 4-sector ECC200 type 11 (40×40) data matrixes. The difference between the rectangular matrix stamps and the square ones, is that the rectangular ones are based on a checkable code stored in the postal service database, but the square ones are printed before the the database is updated. They were designed to be printed on machines that don’t have constant network connections (circa 2000), so that the codes can be batched up and sent via occasional modem calls. Specifications allowed a machine to wait as many as 90 days before registering the stamps. As such, roughly half the encoded data is a cryptographic signature. If the postal system receives mail with a stamp it has no record of, it can still verify it was created on an authorised device by checking the signature. (By the end of 2024, USPS stamp registration must happen within 3 days.)
28:13 The prop for the unit found in the car is a “Launch Creader V+” diagnostic unit.