Notes for season 4, episode 1, “Panopticon“
01:51 “An Artificial Intelligence bought your paper.” The people in the bar in Budapest discuss the idea that a non-human entity can influence governments, affect livelihoods, manage what the press can say about them, and operate without any real accountability. Mmm, they’re called “corporations”.
02:00 I guess the feeds made available by the NSA to Samaritan also includes CCTV in Hungary?
04:00 Samaritan has a particularly terse interface, almost a “magic eightball” level of information.
10:36 Shaw gets a phone notification indicating a match on her online dating profile (Angler) but declines the match.
11:12 The team is operating in a world of total surveillance. They need generate the most “normie” data exhaust in order to avoid being identified as deviants. The Machine is coordinating the team by putting entries in their online calendars for public events – in this case a “positivity” seminar.
13:29 Reese gets a new number, but doesn’t have access to Finch’s library to look up the Dewey Decimal Classification. Presumably he drops by a public library rather than risking looking things up online.
13:56 “There is no sanctuary.” Finch’s line here is probably also alluding to the scene in Logan’s Run (1976) where Logan is being interrogated, by the computer that runs the city, for the location of “Sanctuary”.
16:05 So many computer monitors in Ali’s shop – but will we get to see the back of a Dell 2009W? Of course we do.
18:52 At first glance I thought the message sent by Ali might be in the Hayes AT command set (the simple serial command language originally used by modems, but is still used for many types of communication device) but it’s not. A91&00271BG.
19:45 Unit 777 is an Egyptian counter-terrorism task force.
20:07 Ali reveals he disclosed the serial numbers of phones (likely IMEI numbers?) bought by gang members to the police. A gang buying multiple “burner” phones from the same retailer is a bit of an opsec failure on their part, though.
22:17 I’m guessing the team no longer has access to their own private comms channel, since Samaritan is able to do real-time transcription and analysis.
22:19 The Brotherhood’s unnamed bar, has a Dr Dude (1990) pinball machine.
23:34 You know that one day soon, someone’s actually going to get an AI to write their ethics dissertation.
24:49 “You have a god in this fight.”
28:11 Ali’s routers are built into AWP350 aluminium enclosures (available on Alibaba). Given the handsets are just regular smartphones, we assume Ali has either set up something like a private GSM network, or (more likely) a mesh wi-fi network covering all of New York. No idea if VHF TV antennas are a good choice for this.
31:46 Reese connect to the wifi network (18547) an immediately receives a VoIP call – so I guess it was a mesh wifi network being built. We see the admin interface shows fake IP 172.72.666.43 “Last updated: 2009-02-18” although this episode takes place in 2014 (maybe a node running old software? A different access point has 172.72.8.3526 and 2014-2-12.)
34:20 The show is doing the “people in underwear packaging drugs” trope, but at least on television the women are allowed to keep their bras on.
38:08 The team now has access to a private encrypted mesh network covering the whole of New York.
40:21 The subtitles for the lyrics in the Jetta cover of “I’d Love To Change The World” show “Lesbians and fairies” for the line “Dykes and fairies”.
42:16 Dating app Romeo turns out to be a criminal looking to hire an accomplice, the implication being that this is a underground fixer mechanism by which criminals can make contact with each other. Which would be interesting in the real world where dating app algorithms are optimised now to recognise likely matches and make them more difficult without paying for premium features.
43:00 Finch discovers the disused station which will be the team headquarters until the final episode.