Notes for season 5 episode 5, “ShotSeeker“
01:46 ShotSeeker, the city-wide network of microphones listening for gunshots (Acoustic Gunshot Detection) was previously mentioned in S4E10 by the name of a real-world provider “ShotSpotter”.
05:36 Finch refers to the room containing the laptop running a copy of Samaritan as being in a “Faraday Cage”. As I mentioned during S3E06, this is probably based on the production design choices of “Enemy of the State” and not something actually effective at blocking radio communication frequencies.
07:34 Do people need to provide full professional headshot photos when applying for NYC Housing? Finch’s database lookups suggest so.
13:00 We get a look at the font being used in the UI designs this season, and I believe it’s a font from 2006 called Rippen. It looks inelegant in a UI, in my opinion, but is in line with the show’s tendency to use retro-tech elements.
14:00 There was a kickstarter for a company that developed a similar “freeze-dried produce” product (“FoPo”) around the time that this episode would have been written. It looks eventually like it went to market with some products, but disappeared at some point in 2018.
17:30 Garvin gets swatted by someone injecting fictitious audio into the ShotSeeker system. The cops arrive immediately, and Fusco advises Garvin to drop his phone and New York cops aren’t trained to tell the difference between guns and any other object someone might be carrying.
28:55 We’re supposed to believe the CEO of a Monsanto-analog is allowing himself to be questioned by police without a lawyer present?
26:56 Root uses “sudo wall -n" to distribute the research document… to anyone else logged into a terminal?
42:58 We see ShotSeeker capturing and automatically transcribing conversations… suggesting that the AI can now listen in on any conversation. Not completely science fiction, since of course these sensitive microphones can pick up voices. There have been at least two cases in the US where police attempted to use conversations captured by these systems as evidence.