Notes for season 1 episode 10 “Number crunch”
14:20 The bomb in the baby-carriage was wired to the radio. It seems like such a movie-plot assassination device, but apparently exploding prams were considered a real threat in post-9/11 New York.
15:46 The thing about phones constantly looking for the wifi networks they recognise is usually talked about in terms of tracking phones (in 2012 phones looking for wifi signals used a fixed MAC address that would uniquely identify them) rather than tracking locations. Storing wifi hotspots might sort of be true, and wifi-based location is certainly a thing… but by 2012, people had already discovered their phones were intentionally either relaying location data back to cloud servers, or in the case of iPhones, storing it in a database (consolidated.db) on the phone.
25:00 “Wish we could hear what they’re saying” “Unfortunately we’re not the NSA” Carter implying that the NSA would monitor domestic calls?
30:00 Finch is looking at a flight-plan on the FAA website. Except it’s faa.org (“Fresno Adventist Academy”) and not faa.gov. (And in 2012 I think flight-plans would have been filed via afss.com – then run by Lockheed Martin – and not publicly available.)
33:30 “Always a pleasure to meet a representative of the blogosphere.” Blogosphere feels like such a dated term 10 years later.
39:29 “Your welcome.” reads the subtitles on my digital copy.