Notes for season 4 episode 12 “Control-Alt-Delete“
08:00 OK, so we’re seeing an ISA team assassinate a group of suspected terrorists in their own house in Michigan. While Control wants assurance about the intelligence, does anybody question the legality of the operation itself? We’ve seen ISA assassinate targets on foreign soil (and, in the real-world, the US will argue that it’s the only option they have in jurisdictions where a swift arrest and extradition is not a guarantee) but the option for an arrest on America soil seemed clear in this case.
10:19 The refusal to allow access to a hard-drive feels like it’s referencing the request that Apple create software to allow the FBI to access locked iPhones, but that happened months after this episode aired.
19:30 Control alludes to the killing of hundreds of suspects on American soil for national security. If they were as public and brazen as the operation at the beginning of the episode, then we can also assume some number of innocent witnesses were also killed to protect national security.
25:29 “He was sixty seconds away from capture” He was on a train about to cross an international border, and Control was following in a car. It’s not clear what was supposed to happen in sixty seconds.
28:37 “Over 500 people have died in police custody after being tased”. Reuters was tracking US deaths, but I guess they stopped in 2018 when the toll was over 1000.
31:16 The ISA support agent in the van is (briefly) played by William Jackson Harper, aka Chidi from The Good Place.
36:30 Finch does an “info dump” about how he’s uploading a worm to the Samaritan agent’s phone. “Sorry, were you talking to me?” asks Fusco.
39:00 Ok, so Yasin was originally hired by Samaritan (via Nautilus) to create code, and then Samaritan arranged for him to be killed. What does an artificial super-intelligence need human coders for? What need the future, of information workers?