Person of Interest S4E09

Notes for season 4 episode 9, “The Devil You Know

02:00 Mention is made of the New York Shadow Map, and camera dead zones, and Root and Shaw escape a pursuit.

04:40 Trivia: the actor playing Bruce, James Le Gros, appeared in both Point Break (1991) and Point Break (2015).

27:45 Finch hacks into the building’s wifi to build a sort of LIDAR image of the interior. It’s implausible as presented, but it is inspired by actual research. If you have two devices, a transmitter and a receiver, at known fixed locations, it’s possible to use channel state information to identify moving sources of interference. And, if you’ve got smart enough AI models (and this is a world of super intelligent AI), you can render a model of the space with highlighted people in it, like a real-world wallhack.

(But, as established in the episode, this is a building that’s abandoned in all but the penthouse. This technique can only detect things in the path between a sender and receiver. It would be weird for it to be wired up for saturation wifi, but not security cameras? Assuming the Penthouse wifi was strong enough, then Finch’s car might be the receiver point… but that’s still probably not enough to build a picture of a whole building.)

37:00 The “lure them into the penthouse and have them trigger a bomb” plan was weird. Was his accountant working there every day knowing it was wired with explosives? Plausibly the safe contained documents and disks that they’d want to quickly destroy to prevent them from falling into the possession of others – but the code triggers a floor-wide explosion immediately? Did they plan on getting the intern to do it?


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