The technology in "24" (TV show)

[UstadKhanAli]

The show "24" has been canceled for a while, but I just got a boxed set of Season 4, and so my girlfriend and I have been watching this. And we were wondering how much of the technology on the show is real.

 

Granted, much of the depiction of how the technology is used is dubious or sometimes even funny, but I was wondering...can and do government agencies have the ability to easily manipulate satellites to track people, provide near-instant schematics of seemingly any building and send it to someone's smartphone, use any traffic cameres to instantly provide surveillance, be able to indicate how many people are in each room by their heat and see them moving in real time, and a bunch of other things?

[spokenward]

Frontline did a show when the WAPO book came out.

 

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/

 

It's online and worth seeing. The most disturbing part is the discussion of the amount of real estate that has been filled with spook contractors.

 

If you follow the data centers you get another view.

 

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/01/nsa-plans-16-billion-utah-data-center/

 

 

The NSA

[blue2blue]

Ever watched CSI?

 

The original show was set in Las Vegas, IIRC. Some years back, NPR decided to interview the guy who headed up the forensics department of the LVPD. I seem to recall he said they had a two or three person department and their equipment consisted of some fingerprint stuff and a couple of microscopes. Most of their analysis was sent out to commercial labs.

 

 

Ever watched the BBC's quite charming Inspector Lewis?

 

It's set in Oxfordshire, UK, the university town and surroundings. Every episode, from one to five people are killed off -- often while the police are still investigating the first murder -- yet no one is ever fired for letting all these murders occur right under their noses. Better yet, if you look at the crime figures for the real Oxfordshire, they don't even bother listing murders as there hasn't been one in years.

 

 

TV is fantasy land, pure and simple.

 

Now... what government is really capable of, however, not so much technologically, but in terms of actual behavior -- often is truly unbelievable. And all too frequently, despicable.