Jorge Herrera
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2025
1:22 · 391K views · Dec 11, 2015
Clip from The Dark Knight in which Batman uses a sonar-based system that turns phones into a city-wide surveillance network.
Used as a pop-culture analogy for mass surveillance technology that now looks plausible.
3 comments from Hacker News
"Beautiful. Unethical. Dangerous." So says Morgan Freeman's character Lucius Fox in 2008 in The Dark Knight[0]. The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too, considering the density of WiFi/5G and research demonstrating the potential for its use as passive radar [1]. That paper metions a cooperative base station, but I am wondering if there is any value gained in knowing exactly what the traffic is (such as some of the intelligence community does) in modelling how the waves propagate and performing an even more passive observation. [0] this video [1] Samczyński et al. 2021 [LINK]
Like Deja Vu ( [LINK] ), The Dark Knight's sonar ( this video ) or the series Devs. I've always thought it'd be amazing to be able to view an event from different angles via crowd-sourced videos, and that it was very doable. From an information scientist point of view, I'm glad to see it's been done.
The logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day: this video